Starting a new blog in 2024
Starting a new blog in 2024 (or reviving an old one) can be an intimidating challenge. There are so many options to choose from, with varying levels of costs and complexity. So how did I go about it?
GitHub Pages
GitHub offers a free service calles GitHub Pages. You create a repository named yourusername.github.io, put an index.html in there, and you have a working website at https://yourusername.github.io. This is pretty neat and very simple. You can add your own custom domain there as well, and GitHub will handle TLS certificates for you via Let’s Encrypt. If you already own a domain, it’s a matter of adding an A-record and and specifying the domain name to GitHub. I started with zero knowledge of the above and had this setup in 10 minutes.
Jekyll
So you have a working (though very small) website. That’s not a blog though. Luckily, GitHub Pages supports Jekyll for building your website, and Jekyll does support blogging. You can follow their Quickstart guide, which is great to begin with, but if you don’t want to deal with Ruby at all you can also go with this template repo from Chad Baldwin, who also wrote a nice blog post on how to set up your own blog in minutes. Works great and it’s easy to backport the Ruby stuff in case you ever want to.
Writing posts
Writing posts is a matter of writing a GitHub Markdown file and committing/pushing it to the repo. The basic result is what you see here. Thing for me to remain to do is add my Bluesky profile link to the bottom of the page and better styling/alignment for images and then I’m done. Easier and faster than installing Wordpress and a bunch of plugins!
My philosophy
Keep it simple. Personally I’m tired of all the ‘social’ networks and the walled gardens they create. I’m using Mastodon more and more these days as well as dedicated forum websites for my hobbies and other interests. So no social sharing links on my blog (though I made it easy to copy the link of each article, did you notice?), no ads, no analytics, no data farming, no needlessly verbose content to boost SEO, just plain content, like a psycho from the 90s/00s. ;)