Blog: Expanded Universe

A more "evergreen" place for concise blogging advice I might give, geared towards people who want to get started from scratch. Updated 2025-01.

Why and how to blog, philosophically

I wrote Blogging Advice for People Exactly Like Me for, well, people like me. Things I say that I think are especially unusual/nonobvious:

• Don't set or feel any need to maintain a topic or theme for your blog. Treat each post as a standalone endeavor and the blog as merely a vehicle therefor. Make posts about topics you've never mentioned before, whenever you want.
• Relatedly, don't try to write for "readers of your blog". Write the post you'd be proud to link to in response to a question somebody might ask you months or years down the road.
• Don't force yourself to blog. Try living your life in ways that will give you things to blog about. Try harder to notice when there are gaps you can fill or improvements you can make to things you you read. Pick up that hobby you've been putting off, and tell the world how it went.

If you are not like me, you might read Alexey Guzey's Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now. Though I kinda suspect a lot of people are on the side of not-like-me that means they are even less like Alexey Guzey.

How to blog, logistically/technically

If you don't want to wrangle computers

WordPress used to be my default recommendation but, as of January 2025, the CEO has been having A Moment for a few months. Google's Blogger might actually still be fine, somehow, for now? I like Bear, where I am currently writing this; it's slightly technical in that you write posts in raw markdown and have to separately preview them, plus you don't get image uploads unless you pay (which I might, at some point), but I love the design.¹

For more options, here's Brandon's recommendations list.

If you do want to wrangle computers

The search term you most often want is a "static site generator", a program that takes some templates plus your posts in some markup language, maybe with some associated metadata, and bakes them out into a bunch of static HTML files, which you can host just about anywhere. There are a ton of options but I think any popular one is Good Enough unless you know very specific things you want. Jekyll is perfectly fine. Hugo is fine. Zola may interest Rustaceans; Hakyll may interest Haskellers. My dark-horse pick I would investigate further if I believed this mattered more than I currently do is Lektor.

For hosting, GitHub Pages is pretty standard, and you get Jekyll "for free". If you (perfectly reasonably) dislike the bigcorp vibes, you might like to host on Neocities, now a mainstay of the indie web, or the even newer Nekoweb. If you are OK with paying a little, in exchange for tiny bits of server-side dynamism or .htaccess-based access control, NearlyFreeSpeech is nice.