I've lost track of the number of times I've published a "Hello, World" post, only for my motivation to blog fade away, and eventually for the blog itself to be relegated to a digital wasteland.

"This time, it'll be different", is also something that I frequently find myself falling back on.

Maybe this time will really be different, since I have a vanity domain name to show for it. You wouldn't besmirch your reputation like that, would you?

Background

I've tried blogging using static site generators a couple of times (Jekyll, Hugo), but I really couldn't get into editing a post in Markdown and pushing it onto the Git repository. I love Markdown dearly but I'm still a bit old-fashioned in terms of writing content.

WYISG remains my favourite way to write long-form content, a habit which might have stemmed from my many years of blogging on WordPress.

Setup

This site runs on Ghost and is hosted on PikaPods. PikaPods handles the deployment of the Ghost backend and all I need to do is pay a tiny sum every month to keep the lights on.

I did briefly consider either Ghost (Pro) or hosting a Ghost instance on DigitalOcean, but both were pricier than this current setup and required more effort to maintain.

PikaPods seemed like a pretty decent choice when it comes to hosting a personal blog. I'm sure that the current beefy setup of 0.5 CPU cores, 0.5 GB of RAM and 10GB of storage will serve me for many years to come.

Goals

Here are the self-serving objectives I wish to achieve by blogging, in no particular order:

• Practise my writing skills - in this day and age where our writing skills are increasingly outsourced to LLM tools, consider this an act of rebellion against our future AI overlords.
• Gain a deeper understanding of technical topics - I believe that teaching and writing is a great way to learn about a topic.
• Seem like a cool guy - I think people with their own blogs are cool, okay?