juan M

As part of my ruminations regarding writing in public, one things that also appeared over time is what platform to use. On the one hand, I “knew” that the platform wasn’t important. On the other hand, as part of using this public writing as part of my public online persona, I wanted to have something geeky. Of course, I was also aware to beware of fads and trends, but I considered several options. I did browse around some people I admire in the public persona writing space (using the Wappalizer extension to get information about what was behind some of their sites).

• Self hosting in a raspberryPi at home. I would have had to research quite of networking to set this up, plus be worried about my home network security, so it was never a real thought, and I am not at that level of needing to control every part of the stack
• Using any sort of Virtual Private Server. From joining something in AWS (EC2, some storage, RDS and possibly some S3), AWS Lightsail, Linode, etc. etc.
• Going full JamStack with Netlify (or, to be cooler, Vercel), possibly joining a CMS for ease
• What about Ghost? Probably a bit like WordPress, but cooler
• Sqarespace? I didn’t consider it, but then I saw the great Ben Evans, and briefly considered it
• I sort of wanted to avoid WordPress (you know how it went), realised I had already set up some sites previously, and also saw the awesome Zvi Mowshowitz using it (and not even having his own domain, like a beast -as I am currently also doing-).

I did have a preference to have my posts in a git repo, which I am not meeting in this current version of this site.

So, I went in for the simple solution and chose WordPress. Despite being a PHP backend (which I somehow dislike without a real strong reason), it ended up being my v1 (or v0). Also, it seems you can export posts as XML and then there are already tools that convert WPs XML to markdown or Ghost JSON (didn’t research much, it’s just seems that there are options).

Again, it was most important to start writing, in public (I even started on the free plan, so you can still see that ugly banner that shows that I am being cheapo (If I just manage to get a minimal cadency I will get rid of it quickly)