Twelve years ago, I figured I'd build a technical blog and write about projects and ideas. I already did some development consulting and I wanted to leave an anchor. Here I am. I'm on the web. I exist. Hello world!

The main blogging platform even back then was WordPress and I never had much interest in Front-End development, so the barest minimum was good enough with me.

The not so good old days

Back in 2010, bare minimum still meant stitching DNS with a WebHost with a WordPress installation with a Plugin selection... SSL/TLS certificates meant spending as much as the hosting cost and having to manually renew certificates using an obscure command line every two years, so... I didn't need no encryption!

Also, Virtual Private Servers (basically Virtual Machines) were expensive, so the cheapest solution was actually Shared Hosting : hundreds of user accounts on a Linux box each separated by only permissions and eventually cgroups against bad neighbors problems.

So I wrote a few blog posts, a few of which kept getting traffic even 10 years later, but...

What killed it

Then I went from consultant to full time dev with a teaching side gig and a now 2 years old daughter. Life happened. Blogging happened no longer. And all along, there was this very annoying WordPress installation and its cocktail of plugins that I had to go and update regularly.

So when my web host WebFaction got bought by GoDaddy and told me they couldn't migrate my account, I started looking around. But then, that WordPress backup format kind of locks me in to WordPress, doesn't it?

What now

These days there are plenty of SaaS offerings for blogging platforms. But if I'm going to convert those old blog posts to a new format, I'd rather it was the last time. So I want a standard format.

My perfect blogging platform would be a SaaS offering that dynamically loads up LaTex files from a Github repository. However, I figured building my own blogging engine just to recover those old blog posts was turning into a pretty long yak shaving chain...

So I settled with HashNode. It has great reviews, uses Markdown and free is a price you can't beat.

I'll be reposting a bunch of my old blog posts here in the coming weeks.