After wasting stupidious(is that a word?) amount of time on comparing jekyll(wow,ruby on windows,really? ) and hugo(ohh,I'm a big boi, I need two repos in world of monorepos to build a blog) , setting up my blog here on hashnode! Little skeptical on how hashnode is going to monetize all of this some day, till then, I'm here. Loving it so far. And for those of you who still write your blog in html, keep it up, I now have different level of respect for you.
Okay, now that I'm writing this, I was wondering what really are the options that satisfy ceratin ideas for technical side of a blog. I guess, atleast some of these are more important than others
- Low/ no maintenance. { I don't want to live in a fear that the theme that I had used for my blog will break someday and then again I will have to worry about migrating/maintaining it. I just want to focus on writing after all, not on "oh, i should build my own static site generator in current trendy language " Sounds good, doesn't work. Well, I might do it some day but not right now. }
- KISS/DRY { I want it to be simple af, no fancy css trickery, no nasty popup asking me join another mailing list, no chatbots and definitely not those auto playing videos, Hashnode seems to be pretty simple and I'm not sure if it is by design, kudos though.}
- Low/Free to use { Hashnode raised a seed round of 2.1 million USD in 2020 from surge and a series A round of 6.7 M USD in 2021 from Salesforce Ventures. Both being well known "investors" , It might be safe to assume the funding is used efficiently by hashnode team. The platform seems well put and I hope they find a way to sustain whatever business model they have(do they?). Again, the platform is freeaf and I intend to use it due to it's low barrier to entry.
- Not so techy { it is so easy to add any custom domain, this is perfect for no/low code crowd that's catching up from last few years. This is just an example, I also saw option to add analytics, though I have not set it up and not sure if I should, I would love an option to add amplitude or something like that, more like a generic "script" sandbox kind of thing where I can execute custom scripts. This might be a safety issue but let's hope it get's easier to add custom tools to the workflow.
- It just works™
So anyway, this started as a rant and ended like an advert for hashnode, I will update this if I end up spending quality time here, if not, either I went somewhere else or I'm having a really good time. People only write bad reviews with passion, sigh, ironic. Signing off. Make sure to manually blink after reading this. Ciao.