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Hello My New Blog

· 2 min read

I am someone who takes a lot of hand written notes and need to draw on a paper to understand and learn something. Thus, I was looking for a blogging platform where I can just take a picture and post.

Goal​

I should easily be able to publish RICH content that's accessible on both mobile and desktop.

Subgoals​

It should

  1. support emoji's 👋, pictures, and tables.
  2. render fast on both mobile and desktop.
  3. be lightweight. No analytics, no comments, no distractions such as other posts, ads. Just content.
  4. require low maintenance and be cheap - no monthly subscriptions.

Solutions Considered​

I considered other blogging solutions available in the market such as Medium and Gitlab pages.

Solutions Comparison

1. Medium 😒​

Medium is quite popular blogging platform these days.

Pros​

  1. Easy to sign-up and start writing.
  2. Out-of-box solution looks good and comes with commenting, analytics.
  3. Low cost.

Cons​

  1. A lot of distractions such as other articles, become a paid member etc.
  2. You are stuck with the style/layout offered out of box. You can't change the color of text or appearance.
  3. Your content stays on medium. It is harder to migrate to other platform.

2. Github Pages 😑​

Github pages is free and using Jekyll themes you can have pretty good blog site up and running.

Pros​

  1. Free to host.
  2. No platform lock-in. Your content stays with you and can easily be migrated.

Cons​

  1. Difficult to maintain. My old coding blog www.rkandhal.com is on github pages. I found it hard to maintain with Jekyll upgrades. It is based on Ruby on Rails and anytime I ran into issues with ruby-gems it used to take a long time to troubleshoot.

Final Solution 😃​

I ended up building my own site using NextJS, hosted on Github and deployed using Vercel.

Final Solution

Pros​

  1. Since I made the app, I have full ability to customize layout, font, style.
  2. Learning opportunity to build new components and use it as a playground.
  3. Easy to maintain. It uses tech stack (React, NextJs, Node) that I am familiar with. Thus, very easy to maintain.
  4. Free.

Cons​

  1. Out of the box solution is bare minimum. It will take some time to have a professional look and feel.