So, the twenties are finally back! And what better way to start a decade than to try and kickstart that late new years resolution about blogging? Not that it was something I came up with just as the new year approached us - I had started looking at a platform for blogging some months ago already but other things got in the way. Oh well.

From a tech perspective this blog is powered by Jekyll and hosted as a “GitHub Pages” page - pretty much just markdown files and some stylesheets that Jekyll is kind enough to transform into something resembling a blog. The (ruby based) tech behind it is old and uninteresting enough that I might just get time for writing rather than trying to hack the actual blogging software, something that has stopped at least a handful of previous attempts to start blogging.

About Jekyll being old - I was especially amused by the documentation section on creating posts where the example post is named “2011-12-31-new-years-eve-is-awesome.md” - that’s almost a decade ago now! Just as GitHub repositories with a “last modified” dating a few years back in time, that would have been a huge warning flag to me had you asked me just a few years ago. Now I consider “slow moving, old and boring” a feature, at least for software like this where it’s not the actual code itself that’s of interest but rather something I approach as an end user.

Hoping to focus on writing down my thoughts rather than coding the blog itself, but given this is all very new there are a few things that I’ll need to look into before I can do so:

  • Should poke around in themes and stylesheets and pick a theme for the blog as the minima theme certainly was minimal.
  • Analytics. There’s Google Analytics of course, but I’d rather use something that respects user privacy, doesn’t do tracking outside of the blog, etc. Piwik/Matomo seems to be a contender here, but not sure yet how to use it with a statically generated blog.
  • Setup something for post comments. Unsurprisingly this is a little trickier to pull off on a statically generated site. Disqus seemed to have ruled this space for long, but their popularity has declined since they introduced (allegedly, annoying) ads in their free model. Staticman seems to be a great free alternative - will check it out as soon as possible.

Will look into my options for any of the above as soon as I get an opportunity to do so, and perhaps I’ll write some about it here as well. For now just happy to finally get something out the door!