Initial Commit

Hello World?

So this is my first ever blog post, probably about 20 years or so late to the whole blog thing.

I’ve been using markdown more and more these days.

It’s quick and easy to write using my favourite tools such as vim or to generate context programatically.

And it’s easy to convert it to different formats using pandoc if needed.

For example, these days instead of writing wiki articles in mediawiki format I’ve started just writing markdown and then doing something like:

pandoc -w mediawiki article.md -o article.wiki

I’ve also been playing around with writing presentations in markdown and using reveal.js to make presentations.

So recently I was talking to a co-worker about mechanical keyboards and he linked me to his blog where he is building a mechanical keyboard and writing the firmware from scratch.

I admired the layout and was surprised to learn he hadn’t written a single line of code for it, and he pointed me to hugo & netlify.

Seeing how I could write a decent blog using just markdown was the incentive I needed to finally take the plunge.

I have experience of web development and have made functional websites, but definetly not the most beautiful - I’m more of a command line person.

In the past the idea of starting a blog made me think of writing fancy CSS or figuring out how to use wordpress to make anything that didn’t look terrible, so I’m happy to learn I can just write some markdown in vim, push it to github and have a blog auto-magically!

Around the same time I came across this post on hacker news, which made it look really simple.

One of the main reasons I had thought about starting a blog in the past was to have an easy low maintenance way of documenting thing I’ve done when setting projects up.

So often I set something up and after it being up and running on a server for a few years I want to chang something, or I update something, or something breaks and I’ve no recollection of how I set it up!

So after registering on Netlify, figuring out the basics of hugo, writing some markdown, I have a basic blog.

I’ve just scratched the surface of hugo. In the future I’d like to add things like RSS, tags, etc. but for now it works!

Let’s see how it goes.