Draft Starting a Blog - The Awesome Way

January 19, 2038

Today anyone can start a blog without little or no technical knowledge at all. That's nice, but also very boring for people who have some technical knowledge. This article will show an alternative way to setup a blog using a virtual server and a static site generator, as well as git and a continuous integration server. The described workflow will be very similar (if not coincidentally identical) to the one I use for this very blog myself.

A short disclaimer upfront: I won’t and can’t explain every last bit of configuration in this article. Instead I’ll reference other articles and guides that have proven themselves reliable and just add some notes if necessary. And before I’ll go and tell you about the awesome way, there need’s to be a usual way to compare it to.

The Usual Way

What I would call “the usual way” would involve the usage of a hosted service like Wordpress, Blogger, Medium or something similar. No technical setup whatsoever, no maintenance, and no worrying about possible security flaws due to malconfiguration. On the other hand a nice graphical tool to create content, preconfigured user statistics, and #####. In other words: BOORING

Static Site Generator

-> Hugo

Version Control

-> Git with hugo binary included

Mail Server

-> Arstechnica Guide

Web Server

-> Nginx

Continuous Deployment

-> Jenkins

Delivery Optimization

-> Gulp pipeline