For a while now, I've really wanted to have a blog. Something about them is just so cute to me. I have a lot of thoughts, and I think they need a home on the internet.

Anyway, you'd think this would be an easy thing to achieve. So many people have blogs!

Not so.

Basically, the core of the issue is that I just really didn't want to make a wordpress site. If I want my thoughts to have a home, it needs to be somewhere I have complete control over.

It needs to be somewhere that words can just float out of my brain. Somewhere they won't be remembered forever by some horrifying database or served up on a feed to any random person scrolling by.

It also needs to be somewhere free. I'm broke.

Doing it myself

... okay, not exactly

The solution I landed on was to use Eleventy.

Basically, the easiest and cheapest way I know to host a site is on Github Pages. It kinda gives you the most basic version of "web hosting" - you put in html files, and people on the internet can see them - no server code.

This is bad for blogs though! Blogs have posts, which are dynamic content. They need to be created and updated and sorted and all of those things that your server would usually handle. No good.

Well this is where Eleventy comes in. Eleventy is a static site generator - its job is to take a bunch of source content (blog posts, in this case) and convert them into the plain, boring, cumbersome html documents that Github Pages is expecting.

I followed this handy tutorial, which covers more than I needed for my site, it's pretty thorough. Much better than the official tutorial at least ;-;

Now that it's set up, though, it's really nice to work with! All of my blog posts are markdown files, which are super convenient and easy to edit from anywhere. It lets me build the site in a way that is really easy to work with, but I get to keep my scrappy "just a folder of code" style of website creation.

There are definitely other ways to publish markdown-style blogs to the internet, but I love that this gives me the freedom to configure, style, and hack my site however I want. It really feels like the best of both worlds for my use-case.

Anyway, I've always admired other people's cute little blogs, so I'm excited to finally have one of my own! We'll have to see what bits and bobs I end up writing about :)