Starting to write

It might be awkward for the first post to be about "writing" itself. So, I'll keep it short.

There have been many occasions where I discovered something I thought was cool, or found a solution to a problem that has been bugging me for some time. I figured that there have to be other people that find them interesting and useful. So, how cool would it be to share them? It's a joyous experience when you share cool things and talk with people; it's about positive interactions.

People find many ways to share their thoughts and ideas. If you're not too obsessed with it, you might just post it on Reddit or tweet about it or start a Telegram channel. I personally like to convey my message in a better environment or platform, if possible, such that it would be felt that it's the right environment for the message and the message really belongs in there. My last attempt to make a blog wasn't to learn how to build it, it was to actually make the stage I have been asking for.

I don't want to talk about the technical details too much in this post, but I'll just say enough: I didn't want an intricate blogging system, so I just built a statically generated one. But I wanted to keep it highly controllable for the future, which was a little bothersome for me with already existing tools like Jekyll (maybe because I'm not into Ruby), so I made my own static page generator, but I kind of promised myself to keep it simple and not make a spaceship out of it. This way, If I actually need a blogging feature, I can add it; If not, I don't have to implement it.

I also hate trackers, intrusive or obfuscated JavaScript codes, ads and unnecessary statistics collectors. We don't have those in this blog. Some people might just throw in a statistics collector out of habit or something. I think it depends on the goals of the website. I want this blog to be a place where I enjoy writing and let others also enjoy it, and share important messages. Checking engagement rates to keep myself satisfied just takes me farther from this goal, and It's generally detrimental to the experience of the users who care about their privacy.

Finally, this entire blog is currently hosted on Github Pages at PyBagheri/blog, and you can see all its history (I mistakenly did a force push once to fix a UI bug, but I won't do it again). You can also clone it for yourself to start a blog like this.

Now, I actually want to start writing about my thoughts, and I'm happy now that I have this place for when I have sparks of ideas in my mind. I wrote this post as an starter, to make the momentum. To you, the reader, the above words may not mean much as you don't know about me yet. I hope I can change this by keeping the pace and posting some cool stuff!

Thanks, if you took your time to read this!