Beginning a blog

After waiting what feels like most of a lifetime, I finally made progress toward writing and publishing again. I've had the inspiration to start blogging again for a very, very long time, but like all projects in my recent adult life I have lost momentum before even starting. The idea of writing has bounced around my head for even longer. It was my first career ambition as a child, even. That dream fell away in the face of STEM. I experimented again in college amid my engineering studies, and I enjoyed the exercise a great deal. But after google-analyzing a visitor that may have been a prospective employer, I thoughtlessly wiped all its contents. The content was not valuable, but I regret the loss of the activity. Today, I not only lack desperation to please some fickle interviewer but also seek to share some wisdom from the intervening fifteen years of labor.

First the bikeshedding

Although literal typing of words is something I can do without hesitation, virtually anywhere and at any time, actually producing a website on which to write things inspires crippling analysis paralysis. To self-title or cling to anonymity? To focus on my profession (or other subject) or allow variety? A gimmicky theme or a simple journal? And of course the pinnacle of indecision, what title?

God save me, choosing a URL encompasses all the prior problems and more.

So for several months, I avoided all those issues entirely and simply took notes about topics. If their collation answers the above questions, I thought, then I will be able to proceed. This plan worked; the pattern I noticed was helpful.

I like to be a real person and take responsibility for my ideas. I do like to talk about my area of expertise; my objective level expertness doesn't really matter. And I want to be able to discuss whatever subject occurs to me. Most of all, I like to answer questions. Hence my current domain name: personal, short, and accurately capturing the rhetorical style.

Knowing the URL is half the battle

Acquiring a domain name is the other half. Rounding out my 3rd decade on the internet, and my 2nd as a web professional, one might assume that I could register a domain with my eyes closed. HAHAHAHA no.

Having had previous blogs, I did have preexisting domain registration and hosting, both via a longstanding and terrible provider. The idea of working with that organization has been repugnant for longer than I can remember. But fully extricating myself from their clutches was extremely difficult. And finding new hosting is also surprisingly annoying in current world. [future article: why modern turnkey hosting is bad][hosting]

Commercial giga-tech to the rescue. Google offers service as a domain registrar, and like all their products they make it as straightforward as possible. But it still takes days of waiting, which is usually outside my attention span. Luckily I had been building commitment to this project literally for years.

New domain in hand, I still had to acquire new hosting. Although I could spin up a server of my own, or use some godawful orchestration of cloud services, or purchase the aforementioned terrible consumer options, those all seemed like far more effort than I was willing and able to invest. I wanted to write, not administer systems.

Luckily there are a plethora of options for hosted blogs as well. But those also come with endless strings attached. I want to be the owner of not just my writing but also the very files of that writing. I did want to retain flexibility to exercise web dev if I felt so inclined, perhaps even write my own css. Most importantly I want to write markdown, because formatting html by hand is another kind of tedium that gets in the way of writing. That rules out most blog-as-a-service options and simple ftp.

Github to the rescue. [Github pages][github-pages] they cover all my constraints about ownership and simplicity+flexibility, while also hosting the files for free.

Great. Now on to the [small problem of generating those files][blogging with markdown]. Thanks for reading; welcome to my blog.