A Blog in 2019?

Not long after I graduated college, I was running a personal blog for fun (and, admittedly, out of boredom). Way back then, in 2001, the web looked a lot different. At the time I was using a somewhat popular CMS to host blog called Geeklog. This was clearly overkill for a blog that got, at best, one article a week published and each post generally had an average of 10-20 views/week (I assume mostly search engine traffic). Geeklog did, however, introduce me to opensource web tools and I became a contributor for a number of years.

After years of working on this personal blog, sadly now lost in history, I stopped having the time to maintain both my personal blog and contribute to the software that made it run. Conveniently around this time, Facebook became open to all comers. At that point it was much more convenient to post on Facebook and my blog disappeared shortly thereafter.

Until recently, Facebook was the platform I used for sharing. In the past year though I’ve become more and more disturbed by the growing number of privacy and ethical violations plauging Facebook. About 6 months ago I removed Facebook and Messenger from my phone. Not long after I stopped using the web site as well.

Surprisingly to me, there’s not much I miss about Facebook. It turns out for me it was just an attention sink; a place to go to blow a few minutes or hours. The one aspect I do miss from it is having an outlet to share ideas, projects, thoughts, and even the occasional photo. Further I realized it didn’t even seem to be important to me that I got “likes” or comments on my posts, it was the (admittedly small) creative element of crafting posts and haivng an outlet to write and record interesting things that I missed.

So, to fill that creative need I decided to start blogging again. At first I considered resurrenting my old Geeklog blog. But Geeklog has not aged terribly well, uses a programming language I haven’t touched in almost 10 years, and is still overkill for my needs. What I really wanted is a simple blogging platform that I could get up and running in a small amount of time, that would not require a lot of maintenance, and would make it easy for me to compose posts.

Jekyll fit the bill perfectly. And after a few hours of putzing around I now have a simple blog site that I hope to make use of when the inspiration hits. More detail about the completely open source stack I’m using for this blog is on the about page.