How should I build my blog? Several factors that I thought about include:

1. Simplicity - Whatever tool I end up using has to low maintenance and simple.
2. Cost - I know shared hosting is affordable, but for an experimentation project, I would rather go cheap.
3. Language - I prefer Javascript and Python, since I am learning to program in those two languages.
4. Design - This might sound annoying but I need to like the look of my blog!

Now let’s go through my different options one by one.

Online blogs - (blogger, tumblr, wordpress.com, etc): These guys are free and often drop-dead simple. They are meant for bloggers who do not want to get into technical things. My issue with them is about fixed design. Blogger has no serious themes to choose from. WordPress.com has a limited set of free themes that are very difficult to customize. Tumblr feels like Instagram to me and I dislike Instagram. Medium is more interesting and its distribution system made it very appealing. I might use it for another purpose in the future but for now I want a multi-functional personal site with an emphasis on blogging.

CMS software - (WordPress software): This is an interesting option. WordPress requires that I find my own hosting, which is not preferable. Functionally, WordPress can do A LOT of things and indeed “over 23.3% of the top 10 million websites” in 2015 were built with WordPress. For almost any feature I want, I can find a plugin built by the WordPress community. The downsides are that maintenance is harder and WordPress sites also seem slow (even for simple ones like my cousin’s personal-sound engineering portfolio site, Teera Music). For my site, I just want text, links, with a few images and would rather not deal with the whole package.

Static site generator - (Jekyll, Hyde, Assemble, Pelican): Static site generators (what I ended up using) turns out to sit between online blogs and cms softwares, offering the right trade-off between customizability and simplicity for me. Jekyll, in particular, is the grandfather of static site generators made for the purpose of blogging. It was built by the founder of GitHub and works seamlessly with GitHub pages, making free hosting via GitHub possible. Once you have it set up, you can just write your blog in Markdown (a markup language like LaTex) along with a few lines of command. If you are not afraid of using command lines (jekyll serve) and navigating through folders that start with underscroll (_posts), I would argue that static site generators are way easier to deal with than the WordPress CMS. Even though Jekyll is built in Ruby, I haven’t had to deal with it at all (using Ruby’s package manager Gem doesn’t count). It’s all been just Markdown, HTML, and Javascript.

Lastly, Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def printHi (name):
    print "Hi " + name
    return

printHi(Pete)
#### prints 'Hi Pete' to the STDOUT

If you’re interested do check out Jekyll.