rayanon

This is a very boring story of why I started this blog. Please read it at your own risk!

Around 2004-2009 netizens (or citizens of the Internet) became quite obsessed with something called blog. Blog is a truncation of the expression web log. Which essentially means a log of yourself on the World Wide Web. Blogs became hugely popular, where individuals published their own website with their own personal opinions or biased/unbiased, correct/incorrect information. All was well and blogs were thriving.

But since 2009, individual website publishing saw a drop and more people flocked to larger platforms for blogging, established by companies which offered them ease of getting started to publish content; while sacrificing the freedom and flexibility that came with individual website publishing. Eventually, even larger companies got established, and they changed the way people used to blog by offering proprietary ways of publishing content: like via a tweet or via a post, which forces the user to write and format the content according to their pre-defined template of a tweet/post. This was the boom of social networks, and people could express how much they wanted with photographs, selfies and their own day-to-day activities; which became less artistic and more competitive (because people cared less of what and how they are expressing, and more on the quantity of posts and likes and comments and such). So a lot of people consider that was the death of blogging.

But people in the world of software were already writing blogs since the birth of the World Wide Web; and they kept maintaining their own blogs even after bigger publishing platforms took over the majority of blogging population. These people were mostly web developers, and other software engineers who knew the basics of web publishing - that is running one’s own website, hosting etc. Even if they were not managing their own hosting, they probably had an independent blog on managed infrastructure, and refrained from migrating entirely to any MegaCorp Inc. publishing platforms. So, in short, if you are person in tech, you probably run your own blog.

Not me. Even after being in the world of software and working as a web developer for quite sometime, I have never had a blog. I, simply, never felt the need of it. Not that I don’t have an expressive voice in my head which wants to speak out and thwart some people, or ramble about some totally irrelevant, pointless topic from time to time; but I never really got the urge to really write up something and put it out there. I rarely post Facebook updates about something that is going through my mind or something that I want to talk about. Many things that I do want to talk about, say to a larger audience, even if that is something which most people don’t talk about, they are already neat and snappy memes shared hundreds of times on Facebook, so I just reshare them. I sometimes tweet about things which are small, mostly news, on twitter; and maybe some interesting quote some time.

Then why did I choose to start my own web log or blog? The story behind it is completely orthogonal to a regular person’s motivation to start a blog, typical me. Recently, I came across this static site generator called Pelican which is a very popular and well known static generators in the hacker world and the world of Python. I have heard of this before and looked into before, but I never paid much attention to it. But I don’t remember how, I just stumbled across this static site generator few days back. And since then I have been toy-ing with the idea to use Pelican, write some totally random crap, and put up some content on any of the dirt cheap cloud hosting providers or even publish to Github pages for free! So that’s the story behind starting my blog: to try out Pelican!

So if you are a programmer, developer or software engineer, and do not have a blog yet, and have been etching to start your own blog - I highly recommend Pelican.

Said all of the above and have started a blog, I plan to continue this blog. I don’t know yet what I’ll be posting or writing here, I think that will become more clear with time.

Let’s see where this goes from here!