Feb. 12, 2025
If you are thinking about making your own blog, here are some links to help you on your way.
This is a very simple introduction to making websites that Pixel Shannon wrote for her daughter to help her create a website for a class project. It’s not completely at a 12 year old’s level, so don’t be put off by that idea. She gives a very good introduction to what HTML is and what else you have to put in there to get a website up and running. There’s also a big list of resources that I won’t repeat here, so be sure to check those out too:
By way of motivation, this is a good post by Andy about why it is good to keep blogging even if you don’t get any feedback that many people people are reading what you write:
For me, Hugo is currently the best tool for blogging with. It’s a static site generator and another website has a pretty good comparison table of the main ones with 300+ and counting. The link I most want to share though is the Hugo documentation because it’s really good and helps you fix problems and extend functionality. I used the docs just the other day when I suddenly had to put some equations in a post I writing!
Finally, a blog generated by a static site generator is generally best kept under version control. If you’re using a hosting service, you can have it watch a GitHub repository and update accordingly when you push changes to posts. Generally the git commands you need in order to run a blog are pretty easy to use, but Git is actually a massive program with lots of capabilities that are quite confusing, especially if you run into them while encountering a problem. I wouldn’t say that learning the entirety of Git is essential and for everyone, but if you did want to learn it then Beej’s guide is probably the best you can get for free: