Blogs have been around for a very long time. Some people would say that is a good thing.
Weblogs (‘Blogs’)
Blogs are definitely a “90’s phenomenon”. But for some people, this is actually still a really good thing.
I have been keeping a blog of some form or other since the Geocities days.
Having worked in customising blog engines professionally, and developing blogs for individuals using platforms such as Wordpress , from around 2006-2010, I have a long-standing attachment to blogging software and the medium.
I do realise that not many people consume blog content, compared to the number that used to. Most of the entire traffic of the internet is focused on social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter et al.
But as someone who has always been interested in writing, social media just doesn’t ‘cut it’ for me. I want to be able to write in long-form, on my own terms, without having to compete with algorithms deciding that some young ‘well-endowed’ woman doing ridiculously absurd things on video for a few seconds is somehow more ‘relevant’ than reading my writing…. even if sometimes, maybe it is.
My Blog Empire
Anyway. I currently run a number of blogs based on Hugo, the static site generator blogging engine . Static site generators are the best for cyber security and affordability - static sites cost almost nothing to host and there are several providers that will host your site for free, and the potential attack surface for a statically generated and served site is almost zero.
I use this Hugo theme that I have heavily customised over several years. I also have developed a ‘writing workflow’ involving a spelling checking, linting, and deployment process which I’m in the process of fine-tuning and rolling out across all my blogs. Using this workflow I can write and publish content on my blogs very quickly.
Because I use Github’s free static site hosting, the cost to me to put up a new blog is limited purely to the domain name registration on Cloudflare , and my time spent writing - I do not pay for hosting, and most customisations that I would want to make are already part of the framework and theme I am using, which I can easily deploy for a new blog.
Cloudflare has a large number of excellent - and completely free - features that can be useful for all sorts of things, including blocking AI-based site scraping, and keeping your sites and domain names secure to a very high standard.
Accessibility updates on my blogs
Lately, I have been working using Gen-AI assisted software development to make my standard custom Hugo Theme much more accessible to users that require using a screen reader. I feel that I should have addressed this many years ago, but unfortunately I didn’t prioritise it. Given my stance on disability rights, this is a pretty big oversight, which thankfully I’ve nearly finished fixing.