Ages ago, when i started this blog, i used Wordpress to get things set up because that is what i knew. Wordpress, or any other blogging platform, takes a lot fo the work out of the process. > [!hint] For the most part you can **just write** It was really nice having all the technical details taken care of. Of course I didn't feel that way at the time. I _wanted_ the technical details. I was actively trying to learn everything technical so i eventually built my own blog, using markdown as the content format. **Markdown is great** Perhaps i should jus say plain text is great, but I like a certain amount of formatting flexibility when it comes to writing. Not much, but things like lists, italics, bold, etc. It's great to have it as plain text because its so flexible. The only reason my posts on this site from over a decade ago still exist is that I didn't have to migrate them to a new format. They've been in markdown all along. However, what I didn't appreciate for many, many years was that building your own blog is a schlep and not a useful one either. > [!important] Don't build your own blog > Use markdown for your content, but have someone else bulid and maintain the actual technical implementation of getting your text files turned into HTML and hosted somewhere on the internet. This is my learning. It probably sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to come around to this way of thinking. I always wanted to customize my blog in meaningless ways. - show the tags on each post, and have separate tag index pages to show all posts by a specific tag (no one cares about your tags) - having a next and previous button to your other posts - on a personal blog like this one, lots of posts are unrelated. this makes prev and next buttons unhelpful to the reader - customizing the styling to perfectly fit my vibe - no one cares about the style of your blog either. it should be a column of text, and be readable on small screens. that's it - you will stand out (or not) for your content, not for your blog style