Choosing the Blogging Platform
Have been wanting to make it a practice to consistently write. And, in the process learn the art of story-telling as well. Before even starting to write. Always a lot of time went by in deciding the ideal platform. This led to procrastination. I started writing on platforms like Dev. to, Ghost, Medium. Struggled to continue and stopped.
😕 Why the confusion?
More options more confusion. Period.
For years I optimized for building. Spent a lot of time figuring out should I build the platform from scratch, or maybe use a CMS, use Hugo because the themes looked cool and many other friends were using it, then thought of Pelican as it was Python-based and I could customize it if needed.
The more blogs you visit, the more ideas you get. As a result, my own blog seemed to be less good than the rest. Ironically, the metric for comparison was never the quality of writing instead the look and feel of the blog.
Developer Bias
Asking developer friends which platform to write your blog on is the same as asking them which programming language is a good first programming language?
Lot of bias leads to analysis paralysis.
Available Options
Why Hashnode?
Platform - It is pre-built. You don't have to invest your time in building or fixing the platform. Time in hand is finite.
Community - Community already exists. You have the option to decide either to share your write up with the community or not.
Blogs Backup - Backup of all the published blogs is available on your personal Github. No data loss. And, making it easy to migrate in the future if needed.
Distraction free - Distraction free interface
🎯 Learning from Indecisiveness and Staying with the Problem for Longer
- Optimize for one thing at a time.
- Purpose of starting the blog is to get better at writing. Let go of the itch to build.
- Don't compare. It's a trap.
- Don't worry and do not occupy your mind with platform-related things.
- Remove anything that increases friction in your writing workflow.
✍️ Only one single-minded focus is to Write.
🤓 Why I decided to write this post?
When next time my mind plays the trick to switch the platform. This post will be a reminder of why I started.
🤔 Did you also face the same problem? How did you decide on your platform?