So after a long time, I decided to write again. However, it’s not so easy getting back on track after a decade of no writing.

First things first, I had to choose a platform for blogging. Having experienced wordpress before(Literapture and Idle Talk ), I wanted to try something more minimal and something which I could control - enter Netlify and Hugo. With their handy documentation, getting started was easy as pie. I won’t go into details, but the two links should put you in the right track. I decided to go this route primarily for a few reasons

  • As I grow old, I am increasingly paranoid about my data. I want to keep my data- I don’t want any analytics scripts or ads running on my site. Hosting on my own gives me the ability to be in charge.

  • I want all my content to be publicly available, versioned and auditable - while git is not exactly designed as a blogging database, I find the idea of keeping my posts in a GitHub quite appealing.

  • Markdown is also a nice no nonsense format. Just focus on the writing and forget about the appearance and other stuff.

The only thing left to do was to bring my content back from the dead and release it from the clutches of wrodpress(it’s over wp- we’re never getting back together). Wordpress makes it easy to export all your content as an XML. The hard part is getting this converted into Markdown for use on this site. This is where I found https://github.com/ytechie/wordpress-to-markdown to be extremely useful and before you know it, I had exported both my old sites and converted them to Markdown posts.

I still have a lot to do however.

  • The about page is still missing
  • I still have categorize my posts(there aren’t that many 😞)
  • Sooner or later I’d like to get rid of Disqus as the commenting engine.They are a hassle for commenters and also a privacy concern
  • Add a bookmarks post- which might just end up becoming the most useful part of this site.