Do I need a blog?

2024-04-17

Title is a bit ironic, because this is the title of a blog post. Following the guidelines of Louie Mantia's article, I'll start this blog with an actual post instead of a Hello World thing.

As a developer, I have most of the tech knowledge already, but I also have to think about the organisational part. Otherwise I'd just have a bunch of nice pages scattered around.

On that, I present to you: my reflections.

There are reasons in favor of making a blog:

• Here I'm free to use ANY HTML TAG.
  Like this one!

  WEEEEE!
  But I'll stay close to plain text. Mostly.
• I'm free to use any kind of styling, script, media, but I can also start with plain HTML so that you get a very fast browsing experience.
• Many social networks have begun to enshittify themselves in the last few years…
• …but if I want to keep talking about my creations, a web presence helps a lot.
• It can help me improve my writing.

And now a few reasons against making a blog right now:

• I have to maintain it in the long run and it takes time.
• I have no idea if I should blog in my native language or English, it's hard to decide. Mixing the two would be un peu dommage.
• It costs money if I take it seriously (like having a domain name).
  For now it's hosted for free though.

Why no domain name, you may ask? In the blog recipe I read this:

If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

Well, that certainly doesn't sound like a nice thing to experience! So yeah, that's why this blog is not on a domain, at least for now. I trust Codeberg to keep pages online for a while. It's not like it's a very important website anyway.

Anyway, if you can read this, it means the blog is up. That's wonderful! Probably.

I manually type everything by hand, including the RSS feed. That's why I put most links on the index page: it's easier to maintain. We will see in the long run how ridiculous this idea is.

The only things I added from the blog recipe are:

• An "article" tag, so that you can read in reader mode.
• A rule to center the page.