In this post, I hope to capture the steps I when creating and publishing this blog.
Context
Why do we need another blog?
For the last few years I’ve wrestled with this question. This question is similar to why take another photo of a popular natural site (i.e. mountain or waterfall) or another photo of your family at the Taronga zoo view of the Sydney city.
I think the arguments can be laid out with the following:
| For | Against |
|---|---|
| Provide a publicly accessible reference point for digital work products | Waste of time i.e. do something that no one cares about or sees |
| Learn something new | Do something that no one cares about or sees |
| Do something that has already been done a million times |
Process
| # | Step | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Identify what’s involved | Figure out the various things involved in setting up a blog |
| 2. | Make some decisions | + Choose how and where you want the website hosted + Decide on what you plan to write about |
| 3. | Publish something | + Get started blogging. This seems like the easiest part but was actually much harder for me then doing everything else. |
Detailed breakdown
Choose an implementation option
You can choose to implement your blog in a variety of ways. The major categories I identified are:
| Option | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Host it on Github Pages | <ul><li>Free </li><li>Lots of documentation and help online </li></ul> | <ul><li>Limited to what Github Pages support </li><li>Test editing done in a developer environment i.e. text based</li></ul> |
| Choose a turn key SaaS vendor | <ul><li>wysiwyg user interface </li><li>lots of templates to choose from </li><li>Very fast</li></ul> | <ul><li>Highest cost</li></ul> |
| Host on a cloud provider | <ul><li>Max learning</li><li>Max configurability</li></ul> | <ul><li>Medium cost </li><li>Still requires significant technical learning to coordinate between cloud provider, setup environment for webpage etc</li></ul> |
| Host on your own server | <ul><li> Max learning</li></ul> | <ul><li> Lowest cost without giving up flexibility of setup</li><li>Need your server to be running 24/7</li><li>Fixed IP costs</li></ul> |
Choose a template
(Optional) Choose how you want to setup a custom domain
Other considerations
Setting up a custom domain name on Github Pages
Setting up a custom domain makes everything just look slick.
There are alot more things to setup if you do this. I only learnt what was required for Github Pages setup as that is what I did
Step 1. Setup DNS records on your domain service
Side note re: redirects
You don’t need them at all for Github Pages custom domain name setup but these confused me alot
- 301
- 302
- Forwarding with masking