Starting here

It sounds cheesy, but everything has a beginning, and everybody has to start somewhere. This is my somewhere.

I considered starting blogging using static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, NextJs, or Astro, but there was a big issue: the time it would require me to get the SEO right, CSS styling, and deployment. Once it is done, I wouldn't need to worry much about it, but I also wanted to have a mailing list, so that's another extra complication. So then I considered getting something already built, so I checked WordPress, Substack, and Medium, but at the end of the day, Ghost turned out to be the simplest, with a mailing list built-in and a pricing model that makes sense.

A voice in the back of my head told me that I should code my blog myself, but my saner thoughts prevailed. It may seem like a quick task, but after you think about it, you can start wasting more time than you initially anticipated.

I once had to write a WordPress replacement for my full-time work with Elixir (Erlang) with the Phoenix framework; while learning Elixir just for that was fun, it was just too much work for little to no extra value than a WordPress site behind a CDN.

I'm trying to tell you from this new shiny Ghost post that if you want to start writing what's in your mind, you should not overcomplicate the distribution method with some fancy tech and instead write, write in whatever you have so that you can capture emails.