Waiting for that perfect blog platform before you publish your thoughts to the world? Unsure whether you even should publish articles? This article is for you.
Yes, you should publish
If external motivation works for you, I would say: yes, build that blog, and do not wait for it to be perfect.
When I say "build that blog," I encourage you to set up your own on web hosting that you pay for yourself. This way, you can truly make the site and the content yours.
You do not even need to lock yourself into a single subject: your blog can be a mix of personal and professional content. You could add tags or categories to help users filter the content they want to see.
Most importantly, I would stress that it is better to have a work-in-progress blog up than to have no place to share your articles.
Be a human writer who writes for human readers
In a world of AI-generated content, be the human who writes for other humans.
Does this mean that you should not use AI at all? Of course not: writing is hard, and it is OK to use the occasional help. Writing does get easier with practice, though. (Heck, this goes double when you are not writing in your native language.)
But I would primarily use LLMs to correct your language and formatting to make the content more readable, rather than to generate content. Here is why:
- We all have our unique ways of communicating. Finding your style helps you connect with those on the same wavelength.
- Anyone can generate content through an AI, but only you can create from your perspective.
- An AI does not relate to you. Your human readers do.
- Human readers may include potential business relations; treat your blog as a first impression.
- Writing is about saying as much as you can with as few words as possible (especially in technical writing). LLMs are… lengthy.
- "If no one bothered to write it, then no one should bother to read it."
Keep the software simple
Blogs do not have to be complicated; the simplest website can consist of only HTML and minimal CSS.
In a world of frameworks and CI pipelines, it is easy to forget that you can still publish a website by uploading files to a server, manually, through (S)FTP: a feature often available with cheap, shared web hosting.
I say this as someone whose blog is a Django experiment that got way out of hand a million years ago:
Find the simplest, least backend-y static site generator (SSG) you can work with, and only publish HTML and CSS files, optionally with media or JavaScript.
We have been fortunate to have several strong static site generators to choose from. I am partial to Eleventy; the Python community also likes Pelican, but there are more options: try some and see which one works for you.
Get the site online as soon as possible
If the lack of a platform is stopping you from publishing your articles, then it is paramount that you get that blog up in the air as soon as possible.
It does not matter if the look and feel is not perfect yet: you can improve it later. (Though I would encourage proper usage of HTML for accessibility.)
It also doesn't matter if deploying your site is a bit janky: you are not updating this daily, and (S)FTP is acceptable for now.
A blog grows with you, so you will likely want to update some things later anyway, reorganize the layout, add pages, set up an RSS feed, and so on.
But maybe think about the URLs first
You do not have to, but this is a personal pet peeve, so take this advice however you like it:
Lock down the website's URL structure, particularly the paths to your articles, before first publication.
Why? Because if you reorganize the URLs to your articles, that is when you break existing links to your content.
Dynamic backends typically offer the ability to redirect old URLs to new ones via a configurable admin page, but static site generators are not well-suited for this.
Also, I personally dislike configuring lists of old-to-new URLs. If you get the URLs right the first time, you avoid migrations later.
Wrap-up
If you wait for your blog to be fancy, pixel-perfect, and all finished, then you will probably never publish your articles.
So get that blog up, even if it's only 60–80% finished.
For those comfortable with some choice language, I recommend Even Better Motherfucking Website as an example of how far minimal CSS can take you (though I would shorten the horizontal line length).
Go blog!