Tyler's Site

Abstract

Do you have a website or blog? You should. There are many reasons and benefits that I could list off to support this, and I will get to that, but in short, you should document your interests and share them with strangers online who share those interests. While there are many “platforms” that allow you to do this, they often have various restrictions to the specifics of how to go about doing that. Having a blog or a website proper removes a vast majority of those restrictions and gives you nearly complete creative freedom. I would argue it is also much easier to archieve your knowledge of past projects with a website than it is something like a series of posts on a social media site; this entire website (markdown source files as well as HTML and all the images) are 12 megabytes and can be transferred via email, flash drive, or git. Backing up posts on a propreitary platform is not generally so simple though.

A personal website can also be a suppliment to your resume in a professional setting. Going through my various projects shows not only what projects I have done, but how well (or poorly) I have done them, which is much stronger than just claiming “I’ve used Linux before”. Writing about projects also has the secondary benefit of showing (and improving) written communication skills, which is something most employers look for these days.

The last point, and the most important in my opinion, is that individuals running a blog or a website is what makes up the charm of the Internet. It’s a difficult skill for most people and sometimes the pages don’t look very good, but that is part of the charm from the Internet of old. These days many sites look too clean and steralized to the point where they do not actually serve the purpose of communication.

“What do I write about”?

Hopefully at this point, I have conviced you to at least consider the idea of a blog, and if you have come that far you should think about what you are going to write about. This is probably the most difficult part because the possibilities are nearly endless. It doesn’t have to be difficult though; ask yourself what topics are interesting (or at least tolerable) to write about? For me, most of the time it is related to technology, but occationally I like to sit on a soap box and preach about things like I am doing in this post. That may not be your style, and that’s fine. What you want to write about may not even be novel or interesting to other people, and that’s fine. This website should be about what interests you, because if you are passionate about it, a following is more likely to come (if you are interested in that).

Another tip is start writing early. Even if you don’t plan on making a blog for a few months or more, nothing is stopping you from writing your thoughts/ideas/projects down now. You can always publish them on your website later, however, you can’t go back in time and retroactively write them. There are various things I wish I had documented on this website, but now if I want to document it, I will have to re-do the project.

“How do I get started”?

Now that you have started writing and have decided to publish something, you should figure out how you want to host the blog/website and how you want to publish it. This blog started out on Codeberg Pages because it was free, easy, and had “backups” in the form of Git hosting. However, there are many other ways to go about it that have varying costs and complexity accossiated with them. Some other options include:

And if you need/want help with this project, contact me and we might be able to work something out.

Writing Workflow

One of the more personal choices that will have to be made is the workflow for writing posts. What tool(s) to use? how to convert the text? Advertising? These questions are difficult to answer without having hosting setup first; if your blog is on a Wordpress website, than publishing tools are built in. Simply edit the page as desired and click “Publish”, however, other tools are available as well. This website is made using a static site generator, specifically, ssg5. Or, you can hand write standard HTML and CSS for each page. The options are endless, and the world is your oyester; it is your website after all.

Final thoughts

A lot of people give a lot of reasons that they don’t have a blog, either it’s “too difficult” to get started, they’re “bad at writing”, or they “aren’t interesting enough”. None of those things matter, just write something that YOU find interesting; think about all the people that post mind numbing videos on social media, did any of those issues stop them? Why should you be stopped from staking your own piece of the Internet to share with the world?

I am going to leave two links below that I fall back too when I get in a bit of a creative rut and find writing these posts a bit too difficult: