Overthinking: Creating a Blog

Apr 23, 2019 blogging technical overthinking

Originally I thought the only decent way to create a functional blog was to use Wordpress. Why? Because the platform itself seems to be what is was built for. Plus, a lot of people who write web content professionally highly recommend it. After spending some time researching what it would take to set up a blog I realized I was overthinking the original problem. Let me share with you my project progression and what I ended up going with below.

Domain name – This is essentially a required cost because it is how people navigate to the blog. I had already purchased the koshicom.com web domain from Google Domains for $12 a year.

Using Wordpress as a service – The prices varied from $3 (requires a .blog domain), $5 (use your domain), and $8 (you get more control over your content). Letting someone else take care of the platform seemed pretty appealing.

Self-Hosting Wordpress – Hosting on a cloud provider like Digital Ocean seemed like a fair option. The cost looked to be about $5 a month or $60 a year for cost in this area. It still would require time to setup and would need to be supported in the long run. My preference was to find something simpler to setup and a lot cheaper.

Not using Wordpress – So what is left when you take away the dynamic or template blog engine? You still need a way of creating content (in hopefully a decent structured format). This led me to the world of static site generators, specifically Hugo.

Exploring Hugo – This one really stood out to me because it promises things like amazing speed, flexibility, and it even claims it “makes building websites fun again.” The speed is amazing because all the content you are creating is static. It’s flexible in its themes and the ability to create or modify your own templates. There are many people already using Hugo for their blogs and some have said goodbye to Wordpress in favor of using it instead. After some experimentation and research, it seemed like going this route was a big step in the right direction.

Hosting on Google App Engine (GAE) – Once again I was back to the web-hosting problem. Where could I put this statically generated blog and all of its contents so that it could be reached publicly? I decided to use GAE because it is where my domain is already registered and I already have some experience using this for some other smaller websites of this scale. The cost is free, but it assumes that all traffic does not go over the quotas that are given. Once the blog experiences rapid growth then this will be an area that will need to be revisited once again.

Managing website changes and support – I have all the code for the website hosted on Github and I manually push code changes to GAE using the Google Cloud SDK (gcloud utilities). In the future I plan on automating, so that I can focus on just writing blog posts, posting them to Github, and it redeploys the content to the website for me.

What I have learned by creating this blog is sometimes you have to check things out for yourself. I spent far too much time thinking that Wordpress was the only way to go when creating a blog. Instead, what I should have been focusing on is: what is a simple way to create a blog? Creating a static website to accomplish that is perfectly fine. Also, I purposely made cost a barrier in this project because I didn’t have a lot to spend and it forced me to really look at every option carefully. One nice thing is if blogging doesn’t work out, then I can easily walk away from it. Last but not least, I hope this inspires someone!