Let's Try Something New

One of my goals for 2021 is to improve on my writing skills. Part of that means that I should be writing more, so to make things easier to achieve that, I'm going to be starting a new blog and resolving to write.

Now, I'm a software engineer by day, so I had a serious question to ask myself: how should I build this blog? Really, should I build the software or host it myself, or should I host it somewhere and let someone else take care of all that? The previous version of this blog was built in tightenco/jigsaw, which is a static site generator. It worked really nicely, and I had a workflow going with Netlify where making a new post would trigger a new site build and publish a new page. I had first used that workflow for live-blogging Laracon 2018, and it did work well!

Well, almost. In the three years that I used this workflow, I made a total of three blog posts (of the five total).

When I was thinking about why I was not posting, my best guess at this point is because blog posts were stored as code instead of content. If I wanted to make a blog post, I had to clone my repo, make code changes, write HTML, etc. And that's great and all, but it's a barrier to writing. Even a small barrier, when I'm not used to writing, is enough for me to think, "oh, let me do this later".

Later never arrived.

So will I eventually self-host my blog again? Probably! But first, I need to get back into the habit of blogging, into the habit of writing, into the habit of putting my thoughts onto an electronic page. That muscle has atrophied, so let's get it working again.

Let's get started.