One of my goals this year was to start writing more. There were many applications that I could have used to do this but I struggled to find a platform. Maybe this was my way of procrastinating but below I detail the journey I have traversed to get to this blog that you are reading. Before I go into the details, there were a few key things that were important for me:
- The solution would have to be cheap (or free) to maintain. Fully-managed services were out of the equation; it would preferably be a self-hosted /open source solution.
- I would own all the content I wrote and the distribution of content through my website would not be owned by a third party.
- I would be able to import/ export content freely without platform lock-in
I think the logical place anyone would start with was WordPress. It was the most well-known platform for blogging. So I tried that and it was an absolute pain to get used to. I first had to choose a theme, set up pages, and closing prompts that were asking me to upgrade to the pro plan. I could not even set up a custom domain.
I had some web development knowledge so I thought perhaps I could build my website. At the time I was experimenting with Vue.js and there was VuePress a Vue based static-site generator. This was precisely what I wanted in the user interface and the user experience was clean. It was also super fast. The catch was that content would need to be written in markdown and the website would need to be redeployed each time an article is published. This was tedious.
Headless CMS’ built with JAMStack was also all the rage and there was an open-source solution called Strapi which caught my eye. I could write my content in plain text and could even add images. However, the installation and setup were not straightforward. I needed to set up a server which would host the content creation platform, which was a separate app to the front-end. There were also costs involved in keeping the server running, albeit small. Other options that I explore include Ghost which had a fully managed service and the ability to create subscriber-only pages.
While writing on Notion one day, it would be pretty cool if I could ‘convert’ all my pages into blog posts to publish on my personal website. After a couple of minutes of googling, I found some good fully managed solutions such as super.so and potion.so. After a bit more googling I came across a GitHub repo which allowed users to deploy a web app which would fetch content directly from Notion. This was exactly what I was looking for and the end result is this website that you are reading from. For now, this suits my needs but I am sure something will come along in the future that I would be itching to try out.
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