TLDR: Write min. 2 posts per month. Does not have to be inciteful. Just stick to it and develop the habit.

Year of the Blog

I am going to start blogging this year. Yes, I have said this before, and it resulted in me writing a few posts, but that was way back in 2019-2020. I quickly wrote ~10 posts in a matter of weeks based on projects and things I had been working on. Alas, shortly after I got a job and writing fell to the wayside even though I was working on more projects and gaining more knowledge than ever. Funny that huh? I, like others, am of the mind that a post has to be inciteful and fully realized, thus developing the post idea, writing the draft, editing, etc becomes more of a chore. I want something more feasible and manageable this time. Not every post has to be illuminating, technical, or a snapshot of me at that point, but I do want it to be something I would want to leaf through a year from now, either as a resource or a reflection.

Site Implementation

A blog has to be hosted somewhere so I am using Hashnode to host, write, and publish my blog. However, as I have a custom domain, I will be using cdrani.dev as the official site. The site is currently a copy of balbas.io which utilizes Astrojs. I like the design and don't want to waste time designing my own - this can be a future project down the line. Next.js will be used to deploy the site to my domain, and the posts will be pulled from Hashnode.

Goals

I want a minimum of 2 posts a month - the topics and content are not of import. I am setting a reminder to check in every 3 days. Additionally, I want to cross-post some posts to sites like dev.to, medium, etc. This is the year I build up a following across Twitter and the blogosphere.

Update

By now you might have seen that I fully moved to Hashnode hosting. I am no longer just pulling content from Hashnode into the Astrojs app. The Hashnode API limits post retrievals to 6 posts per request. Additionally, the API doesn't support series (yet, hopefully), which is integral to how I want to separate the topics I want to explore.