I have tried to keep a blog several times. It never stuck.
The first attempt was on Blogger, sometime in school. I did not write much. Eventually I deleted it. Then for a while I used Telegram’s Telegraph as a dumping ground: quick notes, things I found interesting, nothing I shared with anyone. It was more of a private scratchpad than a blog.
After that I tried building something. A Flutter web frontend, then a Python/Django backend hosted on Heroku. I was doing an internship at the time that used Django for most of the full stack, so it made sense to learn it properly. I had wanted to try Wagtail on top of it, but between the internship and a commute that ate up six hours a day, that never happened. Then I found Astro and used an existing blog template to get started. It had its own templating conventions to learn, but it was nice enough. I kept it for a while.
At some point I started reading Drew DeVault’s blog. The writing pulled me in: direct, technically honest, no padding. He has written a lot about getting people to blog, and it worked on me. Around the same time I found Fareed Zakaria’s blog, which runs the same theme and has the same sensibility, but oriented around Nix, Bazel, and linkers. Reading both of them reminded me why I wanted to document things in the first place.
Fareed’s blog runs a theme derived from Drew’s. This one does too, adapted again for my own setup.
Drew recently rewrote his blog using Zine, a static site generator written in Zig.11Zine was created by Loris Cro, VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation. The name is a nod to fanzine. It was publicly announced in September 2024 and is still alpha software. The official site is at zine-ssg.io. I read the post and thought about making the jump. Then I thought about waiting to see how the tooling matures. Then I remembered I had thought the same thing about every platform before this one.
So: Jekyll. Old, stable, documentation everywhere. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The source is on GitHub. Nothing clever. I want something that stays out of the way so I can write when I have something worth writing about.
Some older posts are making their way over from the previous setup. Not all of them will survive the migration. Some might end up in an archive, some might not make it at all. I am not losing sleep over it.
I am not a serious blogger. I write occasionally, when I run into something interesting or build something small. That is all this is.