Announcing My New Medium Blog

And looking back on my personal journey of writing stuff and publishing it online. 🎉

Update: February 11, 2018I ultimately decided it would be best to stick to my website. lol.

So I first decided that blogging would be a fun thing to do in my spare time back in the summer of 2013.I had just graduated high school and I was terribly excited to get away from the very familiar scene that was my hometown of Norfolk, VA. While my peers would flaunt their out of state colleges that they’d be attending, I was on my way out of the country. Germany was my next step as I finalized my decision to pursue computer science at Jacobs University. Later on, after just one semester, I would transfer and go back to VA a tad more humble but that’s a different story.So with this big change, I figured a blog would help me navigate my new adventures within the realms of college. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯ Later on, I would learn that this hypothesis proved to be correct as I slowly became more obsessed with publishing new content online but that too is a whole nother story.Anywho, back in 2013, I did a bunch of research into what would be the best option to manage my blog and while I tested out a bunch of different platforms, I ultimately decided on WordPress. It was a pretty good decision as WordPress offers a lot of obvious benefits and I ended up staying with the platform for nearly 4 years.HOWEVER, around the beginning of this year, I finally decided WordPress was going to be way too expensive in the long-run so I decided to make the switch to Jekyll. Jekyll being the most popular static site generator option out there and rightfully so as it was created by GitHub. My research for this step involved testing the most popular static site generators and seeing which ones had the largest community with the best documentation. With Jekyll being around so long and created by GitHub, I figured it would make the transition easier.Ultimately it still took me a while to migrate all my blog posts over and in the mean time, I began to appreciate more and more how easy it is to just rely on the easy workflow towards publication that a CMS like WordPress offers.After a few intense months, I was done more or less with the migration and satisfied with the look.Unfortunately, Jekyll proved to be way too slow when it came to serving up my hundreds of pages and posts that I had migrated from my WordPress blog. 😥Development became such a pain that I became unmotivated to work on anything to work on my website in general. Even with all my attempts to try and make the website compile faster, working with Jekyll had not become my cup of tea.I decided once again to look at what options I had. I knew I wanted to work with a static site generator so I wouldn’t have to pay any subscription costs and would have more control over the look and feel. But I also needed an option that was fast, where it was easy to get started and where there was an option to import my Jekyll posts.SO I started the switch AGAIN to Hugo which is a newer static site generator that uses Go. It’s actually been terribly pleasant working with Hugo and moving forward I’ll be using Hugo to create my much leaner website.Within the last few months, I started just getting really tired of micromanaging my blog and online identity so I’ve decided to just say fuck it and go with whatever is most the popular option available to publish my blog posts. So here I am on Medium. I’ve already migrated all my posts from my original WordPress blog which had the bulk of it and so now all that’s left is migrating the few posts I created from my static site generator days.

From here on out, I’m going to try and spend less time setting up my blog/portfolio/website/etc. and just focus on actually creating and publishing new material. This is part of what originally enticed me to start blogging and I want to go back to those origins.

SO here’s to the last month of 2017 — cheers! 😊