Starting This Blog

I have been itching to write and start my blog for a long time now. There is no dearth of inspiration around the web, and I did try a few times to get started. I tried different platforms to author and host my website. I tried Ghost, Blot, and WordPress, set up my site, wrote one entry and then abandoned it. But I think I always got stuck with the side quest of building the perfect blogging platform rather than focusing on writing itself.

And then I decided to use Jekyll as my publishing tech stack and Cloudflare Pages for hosting this site. Cloudflare Pages is a JamStack platform that allows you to deploy static websites quickly from GitHub. Cloudflare Pages natively supports Jekyll. The setup was quick and easy, requiring no complicated setup. Cloudflare is also my choice of DNS for this site’s domain, which again made it super easy to set it up for this site. I cannot say this enough about how easy Cloudflare made it to get this site up and running.

I still spent some time setting up Jekyll and writing the CSS for this site. The primary reason I did this was to learn Jekyll and CSS basics. I took a lot of inspiration from websites around the web I follow. I have tried to keep it simple at the moment. The only complicated thing this blog includes at the moment is archive pages, especially for tags. I plan to include sidenotes in the future, which involves building some HTML at compile time and including CSS. But I’ll leave that to be done sometime in the future and focus on getting some writing done.