Written by Peter Weilnböck
Published on: 2023-02-22
Musings about starting a blog
I feel like there are currently a lot of blogs popping up.
Maybe I am just more sensitive to blogs at the moment, since I became more interested in it myself.
Or maybe I am learning more about different blogs, now that I have found a creative community that is interested in blogging and therefore present their own blogs?
While I do keep a journal (an honest, old-fashioned notebook made out of dead trees, and I use a fountain pen to write in it), somehow a blog does seem to provide a different kind of outlet. And there are some of my thoughts, that I do not mind to share. While they might not be gems of philosophy or nuggets of useful wisdom, maybe someone does appreciate them.
And if not - it still is mainly for myself. To gather my thoughts. To shut them out into the world, so that my brain is free for new thoughts, now that there is an outlet for the old ones.
The urge for my own blog also grew, because my wife is currently quite active on hers - https://www.kdw.life, and seems to be quite happy with it.
Another source of inspiration is Mastodon, or to be more precise, some of the people there that I follow.
Since I decided to host my own Mastodon instance, it also made sense for me, to have complete control over the Blog as well. There are a few options out there, but it made sense to me, to not only have it on my own domain, with just my own writing, but also to be independent from some website provider. My wife’s blog is on Squarespace, which works quite well for her, and is also rather convenient. But for myself, I wanted a bit more direct control.
Inspired by another blog, I learnt about on Mastodon (https://elizabethtai.netlify.app/posts/why-astro/) I decided to go with Astro (not immediately - I also took a good look at Hugo, since it was kind of recommended by one of my favourite podcasts - http://www.bitsundso.de). Since the articles themself are just markdown, migrating to another system should not be too complicated, I think.
One big downside, that I can see is the design. Since I have no experience with styling, it might look rather… well, lets call it “creative” for some time. Or for ever. Maybe just implementing one of the templates will do the trick. I am very much still learning.
Since this is the first entry, I think I should also talk about, what to expect from this blog.
I guess a lot of rambling. Walls of text like this one to various topics. My interests tend to shift quite often, and then I need an outlet for the current obsession. I guess I might introduce categories at some point, to make it a bit easier to navigate. If the blog exists long enough for that. As I mentioned, my interests shift, and I might loose interest in blogging again, so this would end up on the long list of abandoned projects of mine.
For now I leave it at that, but I think, I will make another post in the future about the worth of a creative outlet, and the benefits of owning the content you create.