I'm a fan of the written word, for both the clarity it brings to the writer as well as the experience the reader gets. In 2018 I published my first blog post, it was quite an exciting process. There is something special about putting your name next to a bunch of words any random person in the internet can read. I enjoyed it so much that I said "I'm going to keep at it, every month I will publish something". Here we are, 6 years later and I've published a total of 9 posts. Last time I check there are in fact only 9 months in 6 years đź‘€.

If I haven't kept my promise of regularly posting, why would you believe this time will be different? Well, you shouldn't really. I don't even know if it will be. All I know is that I have a different kind of motivation that makes me feel like I will stick to it. Maybe its thanks to Writing for Developers and the many blogs I've subscribed over the years that are writing such amazing things, maybe is that the work I'm doing now and in recent years feel more interesting to write about. I'm not sure, I guess time will tell.

Instead of forcing myself to a publishing schedule, I'm changing my working habits to introduce note taking and deeper dives more frequently, hoping that interesting blog posts will come up from this work.

Now to the tech part. Since my first blog post in 2018 I've kept the same blog style:

I was using Hugo with the PaperMod theme running on Vercel. It was simple, easy to setup and I kind of forgot about it. However there were a few problems with this setup:

  • No "newsletter" functionality: I'm a heavy user of per-blog subscription to get a notification when new posts are published. I use Fastmail and I have a rule that sends all of them to a "Feed" folder. I've heard others use a similar configuration and I want my blog to fit in.
  • Git-based publishing: with Hugo you write .md files in your repository. When pushed Vercel takes care of rebuilding the HTML files and your blog gets updated. Its a nice setup, but its not very portable. I use my phone for note taking on potential blog posts, sometimes I even write them entirely (Why I joined Dagger is one example).
  • Upgrades: it might be due to the cadence, but every time I went and did an upgrade many things broke. Eventually I decided to stop upgrading, commit the hugo binary and be done with it.

Basically, I was looking for a completely managed blogging solution. That is where ghost.io comes in. It fixes the problems I had before and adds a few nice features that I might eventually use. I'm using the OnFlow theme from Priority Vision. I like the similarity to PaperMod. Its simple and gets out of the way when reading blog posts.

All links should be working correctly. If you find anything broken or you have general feedback on the new design let me know! Until the next one đź‘‹