For a very long time, I thought of having a personal site to publish my writings. Had explored Substack and Medium in the past, but thought of having an own space.
Even bought the domain almost an year back.
I had a list of 3/4 sites I have been following and want to keep as a reference for my site.
Of which Vishnu’s site is WordPress. Nithin’s site is custom made and self hosted. Manas’s site is built using Jekyll, a static site generator, using a customized Minima theme and hosted on GitHub Pages for free.
My first preference was WordPress only. It costs $48 per year, easy to use and no headache. But the themes available were limited. Even after spending some good time, I couldn’t find a theme matching my needs.
Wrodpress.org supports tons of free/paid themes. But that requires self hosting. There are available hoisting services like Hostinger, Bluehost etc. But that comes with a cost and it gonna take some setup.
Had a Ghost account earlier. But that was paid and didn’t find that appealing.
Not interested in newsletters and don’t want to announce people everything I write. So don’t want to get into Substack.
Finally with a bit of hesitation decided to explore the Jekyll route Manas is using. I really like the simplicity of his site. My concern was that, me not being a developer would be able to do the initial setup? And the content has to be in markdown to publish. Would that be a friction for me as I never wrote anything in md.
Checked the setup in ChatGPT and understood that it’s doable. And, I write completely on Notion and from Notion, there is option to directly export content as markdown.
To add photos, I can add them to Assets file and just have to add that name to the content. If I don’t want to bloat the assets file, can even upload the photos to Imgur or CDNs and put that link to the content. It also supports links, code snippets etc.