Hello World... Again

Welcome to my third attempt at starting a blog (and actually writing more than a couple of posts). Let’s start with a little history of my previous attempts, shall we?

My first blog

I started my first blog six - I think - years ago. I used Wordpress, which I’d installed on my server. All in all, it wasn’t too bad, and I actually wrote a couple of posts. Keeping up with all the admin just took too much time, with Wordpress and so many plugins having patches for vulnerabilities released what seems like every week. On top of that, Wordpress was just slow in my experience. Even with multiple plugins and hacks to speed it up as much as possible, I never quite got the performance I wanted.

I later migrated away from that hosting provider, keeping a copy of my database, in case I’d ever want to migrate the blog to a new server, but with the amount of people visiting my blog and the effort required to keep the Wordpress blog up, I never felt like it was worth it.

Spooky

Later, I don’t remember how much later, but it’s also a couple of years ago by now, I decided to have another try at writing some articles about my projects, and various other things. After searching for a good CMS, I eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on my DigitalOcean droplet.

Ghost immediately seemed like a much nicer option. I was able to write my posts using Markdown in a distraction free editor. There were also a lot of good-looking minimalist themes, which also appealed to me.

I don’t fully remember why I stopped using Ghost, but it was probably a mix between configuration issues I was having, and simply not having enough time or interesting subjects to write anything interesting.

Third time’s a charm

Now, here’s attempt number three! I have been collecting things to write about for the past few months and I’ve been planning on setting up a better website for myself.

Now is finally the time.

This time round I’m using Hugo, hosted on Netlify. I’ve been using Hugo for some small side projects for a while now, and I love how well it works with Netlify. I can write posts from any of my devices (and inside Visual Studio code while I’m working on other things), and simply commit the changes to the git repo. It’s fast, and it’s secure, because the website does not have a backend that needs authentication.

When I push my changes, Netlify automatically builds the website and sets it live immediately as a fast, static site. Not having to manage the web server myself, a fast CDN and free SSL by LetsEncrypt makes that this blog is much easier to manage than most of my other websites. Oh, and this is all just on the free tier of Netlify 😍

Will I find the time to write more posts than the previous times, or will this be the only post on this blog? Check back soon to find out!