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IMO the biggest barrier to blogging (and the cause of most blogs dying) is inconvenience, and minimizing that if the biggest advantage of Markdown + Git. If the
by staysaasy 6y ago
IMO the biggest barrier to blogging (and the cause of most blogs dying) is inconvenience, and minimizing that if the biggest advantage of Markdown + Git. If there's any inconvenience at all, it naturally drags on the process of writing, and writing takes enough time and focus that if there's any friction it's too easy to push things off to the next day.
My co-author and I use Markdown and Git as the author suggests, and one of the best things is that between simple CI/CD pipelines and effortless scaling of a static site, we don't need to do any technical work so there's no friction on my lifestyle. We've been writing for almost a year now, 4+ posts a month, and 99% of that "work" has just been writing.
Writing with a partner helps a ton as well.
- yhoiseth 6y agoLove your blog!
- WorldMaker 6y agoOn the inconvenience front, I think that also makes it clear why so much stuff that would have been blogs, say prior to 2013 to pick a pseudo-random date [1], is that the convenience of various walled gardens got very convenient. It's really easy to post an update to the walled garden social media site of your preference (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, whatever), and with network effects really conveniently easy to have some sense of readership (even if it just Likes or Faves or whatever). There are some blogs that I realize will never "come back" so long as "everyone is on Twitter these days". Because Twitter is still so much more convenient that blogs (even ones in Markdown + Git). [1] Okay, not actually random, it was the Google Reader shutdown year. Google Reader provided a lot of convenience to RSS, including social media-like network effects, that almost brought blogs mainstream.
- MrPowers 6y agoAny suggestions for static site generators / where to host? I'm thinking about starting a new blog with Hugo / Digital Ocean. I have a popular Spark blog on Wordpress (https://mungingdata.com/ https://mungingdata.com/) and can relate to your sentiment that any inconvenience can hold up the writing process. Your post is motivating me to streamline my publishing process.
- eracle1 6y agoWhat's your tech stack?
- sofixa 6y agoHugo is great, and they have a section with tutorials on how to host on a bunch of different platforms, so pick the one that you're most comfortable with or seems best/cheapest: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/ If you have no idea, Netlify is good and with a good free tier.
- staysaasy 6y agoGitlab and Github both have static site hosting options. Netlify works great as well. We've gotten it to the point where we just push new pages via git and it all works. Anything more and you'll find yourself procrastinating ever so little at a time...
- approxim8ion 6y agoNetlify is great, I was on GitHub Pages and Neocities before, but after I got my own domain, moving the site to Netlify was a matter of minutes.