Why a blog?

It’s been a while that I wanted to run a blog. I think, the last time I did one, was on Blogspot, and the last post was from late 2009.

So yes, it took me some time to decide myself.

Maintaining a blog, but for which purpose ?

According to me, a blog is a way to share stuff that you like on the Internet, without being forced to use any social network. Now, 8 years after my last post, I think this blog will be a kind of personal Internet log.

The subjects that I would like to share on these pages are all the things that I like and that I found on the Internet.

Here’s a quick list :

• Drupal
• Git
• Sciences
• Work

These four stuff are the things that I like the most on the Internet. Oh, and I just noticed that I forgot one important subject: the Internet “meme” :-)

So as I said, it took me quite a lot of time to decide myself to run a blog.

I could have decided to use an existing social network to share my stuff, but I wanted to do it myself so I could customize it and learn something while doing it. Moreover, sharing stuff on Twitter is fine, but 160 characters are often not enough to express your feelings. Then as I’m not an active user on Facebook and on Google Plus, I wanted to find something else.

Let’s use a software to run my own blog.

As a Drupal contributor, the logical path was to have a blog running with Drupal, version 8 please. I though about running it with it, but it would be overkill for just a simple blog.

This is why I decided to check what were the tools available to do such a thing, without too much hassle.

I didn’t want to pay for it, I wanted something simple to use and simple to update, I wanted something secure.

This is when I discovered Jekyll.

Jekyll is a simple static site generator written in Ruby. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through a converter, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website.

You’ll need a bit of time to use the Ruby commands but after some time, you’ll get used to it.

The procedure to create a new post is to create a file in a particular directory, commit and push to Github, and it’s done.

My colleague @netlooker advised me Hugo, the same kind of tool, written in Go. Even if it seems to be a great tool, I still prefer Jekyll because it’s used by Github Pages and Github regenerates the pages automatically as soon as you modify the repository.

I think we could discuss days and nights about which software to use and which languages to use.

The conclusion is: Use the one you want and think it will do the job. On my side, with Jekyll, I’m 100% satisfied.

Last but not least, as English is not my mother tongue, running a blog will help me to maintain a good level of written English.