Well, here we go…
I’ve been at this awhile
I’ve blogged before, mostly on Medium.com, where I’ve posted several technical articles. However, Medium (just like YouTube), is looking at ways to monetize their (my) content, and when this happens, the nature of the game changes. I’ve noticed, as have others, that my posts are not reaching as wide an audience as before.
Build your own, and crosspost like a daemon
The current received wisdom is to create your own blog, then crosspost to other blogging sites to increase visibility. In other words, don’t rely on a blogging platform, rely on a blog hosting service instead.
And then there’s the freedom
If you have your own blog, under your own domain, where you control the layout and format and feature set, it’s more in tune with the content you wish to produce. I’m also not limited to technical topics. I can post limericks if I want, though I will have to figure out how to allow subscribers interested in technical stuff to opt out of the fluff. That means I have figure out how to get a subscription service running. I know it’s possible in GraphQL, and that’s one of the reasons I chose Gatsby as my blogging framework.
I’m using Netlify as the hosting service, which allows me to use their content management system (so I don’t have to remember quite so much Markdown) and github-based publishing.
It is more work
Since I am using a framework for web site generation, I have to adapt framework-think, and do my best not to work around the framework. So there’s a learning curve there that I’m just now getting on top of.
In the end
This site will be the fount of all my wisdom and foolishness. May little rivulets of creativity flow from it.