Creating this Blog

Yes, I’ve got a blog (again)

Inspired by the audio version of the book “The complete Software Developer’s Career Guide”, which emphasized the importance of having a blog to developers, I decided to create and - hopefully - even maintain one.

Choosing a blogging platform

What is most appealing about creating a blog to a developer? Right, choosing and setting up a blogging platform. Well, in fact it would be even more fun to program my own. And then never ever actually write a post.

After some past experience with Wordpress that I had set up myself and that eventually got hacked (somebody didn’t care about keeping it up to date) it was clear that this wouldn’t be my choice. As all platforms that, like Wordpress, generate the actual web pages on the web server and thus run code there have that potential vulnerability I decided to use a static site generator.

My general choice: A static site generator

Static site generators pre-generate the web site while or shortly after content has been updated. They are essentially programs that take some blog posts in an editable format as input and generate all the files that comprise a beautifully formatted web site as output. These files are then uploaded to a web server.

Advantages of static site generators

• No code runs on the web server which means nothing is introduced that might provide a surface area for attacks to the web server.
• Fast page load times because all the pages are generated ahead of time.
• As a result of fast page load times pages might get a higher rank from search engines.
• Easy to switch web hosts because all there is to do is to copy some files.

Disadvantages of static web site generators

• No WYSIWYG (i.e. while the posts are edited, they don’t look the way they will when published).
• Takes longer to publish new content.

My specific choice: Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator. It has the reputation to be fast at generating the site. It’s programmed in the Go programming language which I like (although in order to use Hugo neither do you need to know Go nor have it installed).

Next steps

Read about how I set up this blog in my next post.