In this post-web2.0 age, people seem to blog less and less, and blogs seem to be dying slowly. People are separated in different Apps where the content is not searchable by search engines.

However, I still prefer to write using a blog. In this post, I want to share how I manage my blog.

Why I blog?#

I run this blog site because I enjoy sharing knowledges or techniques I have learned. A lot of these knowledges are from blog posts of others, GitHub or Stack Overflow. Since I get these knowledges for free, I have a strong motivation to make what I have learned free for others. In a bigger sense, free exchange and access of ideas and knowledge makes the world a better place. This is also what FOSS is about.

Although some of the blog posts may only be helpful to myself, but who knows, I hope they will be helpful to someone else in some day.

What I write?#

I usually share what I have learned during my work or my spare time. I write anything I am interested.

Occasionally, I also write about what I am reading, what I thought, etc.

When I write#

I often save some notes about a topic or an idea in my free time. Later, when I have time, I will expand the notes to a full blog post. This way, I do not need to worry what to write. I always have something to share when I want to.

Tools I use for writing#

All my blog posts are written in Markdown format with the help of the greatest editor neovim¹. I use neovim because it is a highly configurable editor that no other editors can compete with.

I use snippet plugins to make writing posts quicker. For previewing, I use markdown-preview.nvim, which is the best previewer for Neovim. I have shared how I write and preview Markdown efficiently in this post.

I rarely insert images into my blog post since image links tend to break easily. So I try to explain things without using images as much as I can. If I need to use images in a post, I store the image in a cloud service and use the generated image links.

Static blog generator#

I generate my blog using a static blog generator. Back in 2017 when I started this blog, I use Hexo. In Oct. 2018, I switched to Hugo for its high performance.

For comment system, I used Disqus for a long time. Recently, I have switched to use utterances, which is a lightweight comment system based on GitHub issues. You get all the power of GitHub issues for your blog comment.

Blog site hosting#

For blog hosting, I am using the good-old GitHub pages service. I have not purchased a personal domain for my blog because I think that is irrelevant. It is the content of the blog that matters most. People often get a fancy domain for their blog, and they get tired and stop writing anything.

Post backup#

In case that the post sources get lost, I have been backing up my posts periodically. Since all the blog posts are written in Markdown, I created a private GitHub repo to store the Markdown source files. I have created a backup script post_backup.sh under the Hugo blog site root to ease the operation:

#!/bin/bash
msg="backup `date`"
if [ $# -eq 1 ]
  then msg="$1"
fi

echo -e "\033[0;32mBackup posts to GitHub...\033[0m"

cd content/post
# here we start to add and commit the blog to github
git add .
git commit -m "$msg"

# push source to github
git push

echo -e "\033[0;32mBackup done...\033[0m"

# come back to blog root
cd ../..

Then I can run ./post_backup.sh to back up all my post sources.