# Blogging circa 2010

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](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving) chain...

So I settled with [HashNode](https://hashnode.com/). 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.