Today I will explain why even for a seasoned developer it can take months to set up a self-hosted blog. Let me first start with a small introduction on why I wanted to have a blog. Basically what it comes down to is that I wrote a series of articles on my Advent of Code experience and I really liked doing that. Although I was not able to complete the whole 25 days of articles like I had planned, because It took way too much energy, getting up at half-past 5, doing the Advent of Code, making breakfast for the family, do my work, pick up quite some chores in the house since my wife was 38+ weeks pregnant, and writing an article late at night, but still I knew I liked it enough to keep on writing articles. The series was written on LinkedIn, but that didn't feel like me, so I needed a place for myself to blog. Being a developer and capable of setting up a blog myself, I took things into my own hands and went for a self-hosted solution.
Coming back on why it took from December till April to get things up and running, there is quite a lot of things that need to be done:
- Investigate all kinds of blogging software
- Decide to run on own hardware or in the cloud
- Find a template that fits your needs
- Customize the template
- Find a good commenting system
- Find a good backup solution
- Install all the software
- Configure the software
- Tweak everything, because it needs to be perfect
- Copy over all the Advent of Code articles
- Adjust DNS/Nameservers
- Investigate different CDNs
- And probably some things that I forgot
But let's be honest..... Finding the right blogging software was easy, I had seen Ghost CMS with a few other developer blogs and liked what I saw on their website. Found a template in half an hour. Knew I was going to run on my NAS in docker for now. And I still need to do most of the stuff on the list, but the main blog was up and running in one evening. And yes it took me a few evenings to transfer the articles because on LinkedIn I had to use images for the code parts and now I wanted to use real code snippets. So I had to recreate the code blocks, but still, I was done in a few nights...
So why did it actually take me a few months? Well basically it is, what has always held me back from setting up a blog, my anxiety to write articles. I always have my doubts if my stories will be good enough or interesting enough. Will people like it or even read it. Can they learn something from it?
I know that I'm a good developer and that I can share information that other people can learn from, but putting my thoughts into paper scares the sh*t out of me. And even though I wrote quite a few articles in December which were received quite well, still my feeling if my articles were ever going to be good enough got back. So until I started installing my software I was still putting things off (again). I had to talk myself into believing that I could write something interesting and good enough to read. And although I would like to inspire and teach stuff to other people, I was not writing for them but for myself. So that even if nobody else likes my articles or even reads them, it would still be okay for me to write and publish them.
Even though the anxiety is not completely gone, having written down how I feel on paper helps. And now that the first article is out there more will come. Please share with me if you have experienced something similar yourself, or are still experiencing it now (maybe I can help). You can tell your story in the comments or if that's too out in the open reach me more privately via private message or mail. I will talk to you soon in another article and hope to see your comments (No comments on the site yet, since I decided to drop disqus and still need to install the replacement, but leave a comment on twitter, fb or linkedin)
