Making a blog

I've always wanted to make a blog however a few things stopped me such as what strategy should I use when I say an opinion or say something factually incorrect?

Also how do I even write a blog? Is there a format? How do I write a "good" article? Where should I host it?

I believe my recent self-discovery when it comes to what drives me has helped answer those questions. More on motivation in a future post.

Setting a date

When it comes to writing a blog, at least for me, it matters on the maturity of ideas. However no matter how mature you think your ideas are.. we are constantly evolving, changing ideas, changing opinions, and in time you may find yourself questioning what you wrote and whether you should take it down or add a notice.

A solution to this could just be making sure that the date of the writing is clearly visible, that provides a natural reference point for readers to make assumptions and perceptions about what you think at that given date and future works can either reinforce or drift from those views.

And that's what I've decided to do, as long as there's a date, readers can use that as a reference point. I can always add a notice or delete a post if needed, but a date should generally do.

Technology

How should I get my words out the door? Should I use Static-Site-Generation (SSG)? A hosted platform? Markdown?

My first thought was markdown, because as a developer that's the top dog when it comes to writing content.. though browsers don't understand markdown so there needs to be some sort of build step somewhere unless I convert it by hand. Given that I've decided to just write plain ol' HTML.

The biggest issue I've found with writing raw HTML for blogging is the manual formatting. I'm writing in VSCode so the Emmet extension is available, that makes it easy for new tags though if I wanted to change an existing tag that's where a native VSCode feature comes in: symbol renaming. With those two features writing HTML is fairly easy.

The last issue with writing HTML directly was the readability of it in my editor. I believe nesting the text nodes helps here. You can open up the source of this article to see how I've formatted it.

Since I'm writing in HTML it's literally just a static website so it can basically be hosted anywhere. I've chosen GitHub pages since that's the least amount of effort but there's an endless amount of static hosting services.

How to write

I don't know the answer to this.. I thought I needed to, ever since I first started thinking about making a blog. But as I think this article proves, you don't need to know "how to write" to simply just write what's on your mind.

Perhaps I'm thinking more about what I want to write now instead of what I think people want to read.