Setup Another Blog

Recap: My Blog “History”

It has been a long time that I setup blog. Yes, I mean setting up a blog web site, not writing blog. You may be curious, why setting but not writing. In fact, it is because of laziness.

WordPress

In around 2009, after having some pocket money when I went to college, I start setting my first blog on GoDaddy. It was the time using FTP for most of my deployment with my limited techy knowledge. But after all database and environment setup, my first blog was out. I remembered the URL was jv14.com , with initial letter of my ex-gf and myself.

There was nothing related my ex-gf as it was a long-meaningless-distance relationship. What I posted mostly was my feeling of the tech news. I remembers most of them related to iPhone and Apple. But after several months, I gave up, due to my laziness.

Small story

After contract of jv14.com was done with GoDaddy, I start registering the crazyhungry.*doumain year over year, including but not limited to

• crazyhungry.net
• crazyhungry.cn
• crazyhungry.info
• crazyhungry.me
• crazyhungry.party

crazyhungry.party is the one I am currently using and plan to keep using it as it was cheap and I paid for 10 years usage with CloudFlare.

Interestingly, my WordPress experience was still applicable with my current job. To lower the cost of information sharing within our group (40-ish members), I setup a WordPress with Kubenetes (company private Cloud). As a result, the whole team is posting and checking the WordPress site everyday.

Ghost

A random day after I graduated, I saw Ghost was another blog platform that very lightweight and interesting to use. So I hosted Ghost as my blog. I remembered the first blog title was Just another blog from Jansen. And it was the only article in this blog because the whole host was removed by NameCheap after I stopped paying, and because of my laziness for sure.

Synology NAS Blog

After moving to new apartment and I got a bigger room. I started playing with my NAS. Of course, setting another blog there was one of the “primary” tasks I did :)

Is it really because of laziness?

I was one of the main concern, but there is another reason, maintenance cost.

I was not using blog for a profit (even I really want to). So hosting blog and maintaining the content update takes times. In addition, the cost of domain and host is unnecessary when I have a fulltime job. Moreover, posting something on the internet may need to refine the content better before posting it. As a result, the motivation of keep blogging was very low.

Why Starting blogging “again”?

There are three main reasons of low motivation of blogging:

• No financial support
• Content maintenance cost
• Host (hardware) cost

Recently, I read an article about why the author keep blogging for years. His main reason were:

• build your creditability of your professional experience
• be your own documentation

These are very important to an engineer. It means you will have better experience with your next job hunting. And your future employer will aware you are not just bluffing in interview, but you have your own knowledge library to contribute the company.

This (more or less) resolve the financial aspect.

With either WordPress or Ghost, you will need a PHP compatible host and database, plus a domain if you want your blog easier to access. However, to a blog of an engineer (or just to me), a fancy blog with tons of plugin or millions of themes are unnecessary. But if we can switch to another platform, or even get rid of database, it will be perfect.

As a result, Astro came to my search result. With unlimited private repo in Github, I setup my blog inCloudFlare Pages with Astro.

This cover content maintenance cost as well as other cost. As a result, I can mainly focus on blogging.

I will explain more about how to set up this blog with Astro, Github and CloudFlare Pages in later article.

Some words about this blog

As mentioning above, this is for creditability and documentation, so it is not necessary that need to be all grammar correct and bullet proved article that expecting many thumb-up. As long as I feel comfortable, I can make this blog to whatever I want. Otherwise, setting another blocker or de-motivation is not what I want to have.