I was inspired by Marius Masalar’s post on blog reviews and so of course found a good reason to nerd out about my very own tech stack.
Here is how my blog works: #
Writing: I use VSCode without spellcheck because I am a masochist. If you’ve ever wondered why is everything spelled wrong? Why does this read as if it was never proofread? well, there’s your answer. I write my posts using Markdown, the world’s greatest digital writing tool.
The reason I prefer VSCode over countless other code editors out there is it allows me to live in the editor. I use VSCode to both write the blog posts and to write actual code (such as CSS, HTML and JSON).
VSCode is extremely accessible. In theory (I’ve not tried this), it is possible to code for both the non sighted and those with limited mobility. I have text wrap enabled along with dark mode, and a nice large clean monotype font.
Hosting and Serving: The posts are written on VSCode, then pushed into Github and finally rendered and displayed beautifully on Netlify.
Static Site: The site is generated using 11ty, a static site generator. I learned to use 11ty with this excellent tutorial.
11ty is the perfect blogging platform because it actually got me to start blogging. Already this tiny little site has over 20 posts. That’s more than possibly any other blog I’ve attempted. The reason why 11ty works so well for me is because it is headless, that is I am not tied to a platform. I can write on whatever text editor I want (I’ve tried Typora, Zenpen, Google Docs, StackEdit, and Dillinger and found at the end of the day VSCode was the best). In the end, the platform that you choose and the writing editor that you choose does not matter. All that matters is you writing, so if Ghost or Wordpress or whatever new newsletter program just got released is what does it for you than that’s good.
Here is a list of every blogging platform I’ve tried and given up on-in no particular order:
Blogger: I hated the writing experience and at the time, all the themes were ugly (we’re talking early days of 2008). Back then I was a dumb 16 year old who thought I was funny and wise. I needed a place to gift the world my A+ humor. I returned back to Blogger a few months ago to be greated with the same lackluster experience. The writing used WYSIWYG, which just confused me.
Tumblr: I still use Tumblr (for microblogging also known as reblogging). The text editor is a pop up that will delete itself sporadically. Reblogging is easy but creating original content is difficult
Pistach.io: This was a blogging site tied to Evernote (a note taking app). The writing experience was OK but wasn’t as efficient as using Markdown and I didn’t have complete control of organizing my posts.
Hashnode/Dev.To: Look, I know these are two different platforms but they’re more alike than they are different. I didn’t like these blog sites because I found them distracting. The focus was on trying to make your writing marketable rather than writing in it of itself. And there was an emphasis on socializing: liking, commenting and following. I found it to be overwhelming (I get overwhelmed easily).
Medium: All wannabe writers of the internet have probably tried this blogging platform at some point. My eyesight made using the hoverable edit tools a bit difficult (there’s a reason why I love markdown) but otherwise, I think someone with good eye sight would find the writing experience quite pleasant. My fear with Medium is not having ownership of my content and also the blog being behind a paywall (I wanted to choose who got to read my crappy articles-not Medium).
WordPress: I have not used WordPress since they’ve upgraded it to Gutenberg but the old writing editor was frustrating. Similar to Microsoft Word (I don’t like it), I found myself focusing more on formatting what I was trying to write than actually writing.