My goal when I started to think about adding a blog to the main site, was to ease even more the publishing process. Static HTML is nice for doing a static homepage and project pages, but it can take a little bit of time to create new .html pages with proper formatting everytime I want to write a short post about my day or whatever I have in mind at the time.

Of course I could have just done one big file, old school style, with shitty HTML. But that would have been a pain for me as much as for the reader who wants a little bit of chronology.

There shall be no walls impeding my writing to reach the World Wide Web. John Gruber had this exact problem, so he created Markdown. Now Markdown had and still has a loosely defined syntax, but it allows the writing process to get closer to the pen and paper kind of flow. It’s now more accessible and known thanks to multiple standardizations, and lots of people use it in their daily lives from note taking to academic paper writing.

So I was looking for two simple things:

1. To be able to write a blog post from everywhere, forever. Be it on a notebook, a public library computer or offline on my smartphone.
2. To have a simple presentation and chronology on an online blog. Bonus if it has RSS and if it’s pretty.

Markdown solved 1) and I was already using it for note taking on my computer. Also, since it’s so simple, I can always use a pen and paper for the draft, doing the formatting when I get to a tech device. The second step was more complicated.

I had some things already figured out:

• Being able to write offline in a text file or on paper.
• Being able to upload that text file in the format it was written when I get online.
• Not necessarily needing special software to write this text file (can either be done with a text editor or a web browser).
• Getting free hosting without having myself being too much the product.
• Having a reliable hosting provider and/or to not depend on him.

Along this, I had the impervious will to keep control of what I’m writing, meaning that I can remove the website and still have all I’ve written in the exact same form I wrote it first.

I’ve looked for long, free solutions like Blogger or Wordpress were what I tried first, but the simplicity was not always there (especially looking at you Wordpress) and control was not great (Wordpress needed self-hosting for perfect control while Blogger is owned by Google). Also, both don’t use an open standard for webpage format.

After this mess of plugins and limitations, I turned to static HTML: a haven of simplicity in this world of dynamic webpages and complex lazyloading solutions. I created the Neocities webpage (that is, my main homepage) and, finally, I could write and customize stuff all I wanted.

But it was time consuming. A lot.

Even when I tried to keep things simple, I would find myself having to fix CSS or to copy paste code to not have to write it again. It was easy on the computer. It could’ve been a viable solution when travelling, but it was not enough for me. Hey, we live in information era, things like this’ve never been this easy.

The final solution

So yeah, why do I write all this? Because I think I finally found something that suits me. A system that’s simple, but pretty enough and that I can easily update anywhere.

Now you can argue that all the time I’ve spent fiddling around on the Internet instead of writing is lost. You couldn’t be more right. I’m the best at losing my time. But I came to accept this. At least I’m learning stuff and I end up writing stuff about it. Even if it’s about how to write stuff. Geez, I’m like these guys making whole websites on how to do proper SEO.

But no more digressing, welcome to my brand new blog, hosted on Github Pages for free, and written completely in Markdown using either a Markdown editor, or Prose.io. The Markdown pages are then converted to HTML using the excellent software that is Jekyll Now. As usual, all the source code can be seen in the Github repository.

For those wondering why I’m not using Jekyll itself, it’s cause it’s too complicated for me (yeah gem install is complicated alright?) and it needed local installation along dependencies at first. EDIT: I had to install Jekyll anyway to correct some bugs. I’m happy to say it’s easy to use. But I still don’t know how to use Git, so I stand by my stance.

I can now write my Markdown posts every time I feel like it, and upload them either by drag and drop into Github or by writing them at first using Prose.io.

In conclusion

I’m really happy, and I think it’s one of the best blog hosting solution to the modern day traveller. I know Github is owned by Microsoft, that is, with a certain history of trying to slow free software development, but that stance might be changing.

Now I know this is awfully complicated to the non tech literate user (at least it was to me). I hope that one day everyone will be able to publish their writings like this, with not too many knowledge and needing only a keyboard. Lots of people are working on this future, the same way more than thirty years ago, people started working on the World Wide Web. Until then, and whatever future you want for global communication, anybody can still publish zines or create a Medium/Blogger/Livejournal/Tumblr page.

If you’re interested in this matter, I can invite you to have a look at projects like IPFS, ZeroNet and whatever new thing is happenning in the decentralized world at the moment. But careful, don’t get lost on blockchain trends. The opposite opinion of non needing such connected world often makes sense too, and I myself don’t know where to stand in.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more blog posts.

EDIT: I was looking for the name. Dreamwidth is a simple and free software network where user can publish a blog on their userpage. It is praised for its inclusiveness and strong community. If you don’t have the time to setup something like what is shown above (its even better in its own way), I can only encourage you to create an account on this website!