Yes, I am just a casual blogger. I published my first article on Medium in July 2019 and it was about Ethereum Foundation's Devcon V Scholars Program. After that, I continue to write when nice ideas pop up, like once a few months.
I chose Medium to start with because it seems to be the easiest platform for blogging beginners. But after I published my second article, I started to want a blog that looks more personalized. I understand that Medium is a great tool especially about gaining new readers naturally, but I still have this urge to create my own blog. So I decided to try out some different solutions.
First, I started with Hugo, a static content generator for websites. I just got into the world of using CLI at that time, so it was an interesting project for me to practice some newly learned skills. I recorded my learning process here. Thanks to Github Pages, it's still alive at pswu11.github.io. After all I really like Hugo, but I clearly know I don't have enough skills yet to make the best out of it.
Then, I went for one of the most popular blogging solution, WordPress. I also obtained my first domain pswu.blog for that site. After a couple of months, I have the feeling that WordPress still is not the platform that I want to settle for due to some super minor reasons:
- It is more than a blog. I want a simple and clean platform for blogging but WordPress is providing way more than that. WordPress is giving me a lot of room for customization but eventually distracting me from writing.
- There are plenty of free themes but nothing clicks with me. Most of the themes available are pretty fancy and would be good for business sites or product landing pages. I am aware that the ideal method would be creating my own theme but I really don't feel like to make that effort (Yet I am willing to host my own blog, I see the irony here 😜).
Recently, I started to play around with Ghost. It's pretty plain. By saying that I mean you don't have all those handy features such as dashboard, page customization in GUI, or numerous of plugins etc.. The interface is clean and simple, just how I like it.
After trying it out for two weeks very intensively, I decided to make Ghost the new home for my blog. As a side note, I am still posting my articles on Medium, because it's a great platform to interact with other authors that I like.
I know some people might wonder, why so much hustle and bustle? I don't even publish articles that frequently, but I am spending so much time on testing around like I am going all professional.
Really it's nothing rational. I just want to feel happy with my very casual personal blog.