Why start a blog? 📃

There are a lot of blogs on the internet. Blogs began to spread in the late 90’s and haven’t slowed down since. Starting out as having single authors, blogs have grown to multiple authors and now are people’s careers.

There are different types of blogs ranging from personal blogs, corporate blogs and microblogging (think Twitter as an example of this). It’s crazy to think how much blogs have grown over the years.

Nowadays, anyone can start their own blog in minutes with services like medium in minutes. No longer do you need technical knowledge to get a blog up and running on the internet for everyone to see.

But here’s a question; if there are so many blogs, why should I start a blog of my own?

Well, I was trying to answer that question myself a few years ago when I started developing this website. And what was my answer? In my view, blogs can now be seen as a way to:

• Share your ideas and views
• A fun project for you to work on
• Share tutorials or fixes for problems you have faced
• Connect with others and grow your network.
• Expand your professional presence
• Learn new skills; such as getting your blog on a custom domain

I can certainly vouch for all these points. Especially the last one. I’ve learnt so much about development since I started this website.

In fact, if it wasn’t for this blog, I wouldn’t have been considered for the role that I have. This blog demonstrated my interests and technical abilities, which helped me get an interview.

What’s important is to keep in mind is that your blog isn’t guaranteed to be a success or make money. If you want to blog, it’s because you want to. It will take time to build an audience, but it’s worth it.

If you’ve got this far and you’re tempted to start a blog of your own, then read on! I’ve put together a useful list of everything that I’ve used to make my blog. From frameworks that I’ve used to handy websites.

Tools and resources

The framework

There are so many frameworks out there for making blogs and websites. I’ve got three suggestions for you to look at. Each using a different programming language!

Gatsby

This website was built with Gatsby, so it makes sense for me to talk about this framework first.

Gatsby is based on React so if you’re familiar with React you will feel at home with Gatsby.

There are several reasons why I chose Gatsby:

• There is excellent documentation and a great tutorial for you to take a look at.
• Plenty of good starters to take a look at.
• Plenty of plugins for CMS, UI, Analytics and eCommerce.

Jekyll

Once upon a time, I made a blog that was made with using Jekyll, and I hosted it using GitHub pages. This framework is based on Ruby, so if you’re comfortable with that then you should take a look at this!

Flask

I have experience using Flask! It’s a microframework written in Python. If you want to see (a rather terrible) example, check out this example of an API hosted on Heroku here.

Websites

If you don’t want to build your blog with a framework, that’s okay! There are plenty of options out there for getting a blog up and running. Here are two that I am familiar with the most.

I’m not suggesting WordPress. It’s not the fastest tool, the most secure or popular.

Ghost

If you’re familiar with blogs such as coding horror or Troy Hunt, these are built using Ghost.

Ghost is an open source product that is funded by it’s users. It has a free plan, themes, integrations and good resources for you to get started.

The plugins available allow you to grow your audience and sell premium memberships. Plus, there is support for newsletters.

Medium

Medium has been in the blogging space for nearly ten years now. It has a lot of users, has support for custom domains and has program where you can earn money from writing. It also has it’s own mobile application.

With it’s large number of users (over 100 million), you’ll be able to find a following and grow your network.

However, with lots of writers comes the challenge of finding an audience and standing out.

Medium does come with some writing tools for you to get started and makes importing images and links fairly simple.

Text editors and note takers

It’s all well and good by having a framework but you need the right tools to put it all together right? Here’s what I use!

Visual Studio Code

I’ve been using VSC for years now and it’s great. Sure, electron isn’t the best framework ever but the overall experience is still amazing for a free product.

I use VSC for working with Gatsby and it’s been great for that. Whether I’m working with JavaScript, CSS or Markdown files. VSC has support for them all, and the community has created some fantastic extensions as well! From supporting languages, themes to icons. There are plenty of extensions available for VSC.

Bear

I used to write all my blog posts in VSC. However, VSC isn’t exactly the best application for writing blog posts. It doesn’t check my spelling or grammar for example (which is to no fault of VSC, it’s a text editor not a word processor) so I wanted to find something that could export to Markdown, syncs between devices and has good support.

That’s when I started using Bear, and I haven’t looked back.

It has support for exporting your notes into many different file formats. Such as HTML, MD, PDF or even as an image. Bear also has a spellcheck, syncing between devices and more!

Sadly, there isn’t a version of Bear available for Android or Windows. But if you use Mac and iOS then you really should look into using Bear.

Hosting

Your blog needs to be hosted somewhere, so where? I’ve worked with a few services that you could use to host your blog.

Netlify

My blog is currently hosted on Netlify and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Why use it? Here’s a few reasons:

• Support for plenty of frameworks (including Gatsby!)
• Connect your repo on GitHub (or GitLab!) and let Netlify detect what framework you’re using
• Built in CI/CD
• Free to use!
• Add or register domains

It also has some good integrations with GitHub. Especially when you raise a pull request when the Netlify bot will leave a comment and update it as the checks progress.

If you use a framework like Gatsby then you should use Netlify.

Heroku

Another platform that I’ve used (which has an excellent CLI application). Heroku has support for many languages (Ruby, Python and Go for example) and you can get started for free!

Heroku also has some good documentation to help you get started if you are new to their platform.

If you use a framework that isn’t supported by Netlify, then you may want to take a look at using Heroku.

Dev domain name

This site uses the Dev domain name. If you work in development, why not use a .dev domain name? (Of course, you can use whichever domain you’d like)

Even WordPress have the .blog domain!

Extras!

Writing and managing a blog doesn’t stop with a platform, a framework. Here are some extra sites, applications that I use from time to time.

Codye

If you’re looking for a fun way to present your code, then checkout Codye for Mac. It takes your code and you can create an image to be used on blogs, documentation and even microblogging services like Twitter.

Free to use, also has an iOS application as well!

Unsplash

The images I use on blog come from Unsplash. The images hosted on Unsplash are free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes. So it’s a great place to search for images that you want to use. Give it a look!

FontSpace

Every website uses custom fonts, and FontSpace is a good place to get free fonts that you can use on your website!

I have a collection which has fonts that you can take a look at and download for yourself to use if you wish.

I hope this post has given you information and maybe even a bit of confidence to start your own blog. Go forth and blog!

Thanks for reading! 👍