Advice on Starting a Blog

How to start a weblog, and stick to it.

April 27, 2026

So, you want to start a blog. You probably don’t care for success—which is good, because you’re unlikely to find any—but you’d like somewhere to post your longform thoughts, not only formatted in a way that is much more readable than in a chat interface or a microblog but also much more discoverable over the long term than the same text would be in either other type of service. What’s nice about blogs is that they usually have an index; Having a distinct place where every single one of your posts can be found is very helpful for not having your thoughts drowned out by the noise of what everyone else is saying.

Then, the problems begin to arise: Which blogging software should you use? Should you use a static site generator? Which theme should you use? Should there be a comment section?

These are the wrong questions to start with.

What you should start with is the single best advice for any writer, whether aspiring or accomplished: just write. Start by writing about what interests you. Start by writing about what disinterests you, even! Write about your expertise, about what you’re learning, about what you did today, about what you want to do tomorrow, or next month, or next year.

Do you often drop walls of text in an instant messaging application? Do you write 30-post threads on your favourite microblogging site? Start collecting them into well-formatted files. Write so much that the idea of not hosting your work on a blog becomes so painful that you need to finally set it up.

Then, make your blog. I like blogs backed by static site generators because they allow you to work off of a local copy of the entire website and simply push up the changes using a version control system like Git when it’s time to deploy. If you’re not savvy enough to do that, it’s also possible to simply run your generator locally and then copy the resulting file to wherever your website is hosted. The results are the same. Once you have a site with things worth reading, once it’s up and alive and starting to garner attention, you’ll be able to start figuring out where you want to take it.

Starting with the site and then hoping you eventually develop a habit of posting to it is the way to have a blog with a single about page and a single “I’ve started a blog!” post sitting around uselessly for a year. The point of blogging is to share your thoughts; You need thoughts in order to make a blog worthwhile. Start with writing.

But How Do You Actually Make a Blog Site?

Okay, fine. Fair enough.

If you have the technical chops to install and deploy NGINX on a cloud server you pay for—or physical one you host in your own home—then setting up a static site generator should be easy. This site currently uses Hugo to generate its pages. The site’s pages are held in a Git repository also hosted on this site. I don’t use a Git frontend here because I don’t need to collaborate with anyone else; Simply using an SSH remote is enough for me.

On the remote end, I have a post-receive Git hook set up which:

1. Checks out a local copy of the site’s source code
2. Runs Hugo to generate the site
3. Deletes the currently-live site, and
4. Moves the newly-generated site to where NGINX expects to serve HTML files

This allows me to update this site by running “git push” after committing changes to the site. The command only needs a few seconds to run, after which point this site has been updated.

I Can’t Do That Technical Stuff!

Try Bear. Blogs powered by Bear look clean with minimal visual distractions. Bear also has a built-in discovery feed, displaying your posts alongside every other user of the site. It should be much easier to find readers than whatever I do for my own site (which amounts to posting whatever, whenever, halfheartedly promoting some posts, and somehow having readers anyway).

Most importantly, Bear will generate RSS feeds for its blogs. This means that readers who really like what you have to say won’t miss a thing you post because they’ll be notified right from the source itself.

Because Hugo has apparently surrendered to the vibes, I’m actually thinking about switching generators. I’m not sure how to proceed however, because I really don’t want to learn another blog system. I might end up writing my own—which is actually worth doing if you already have years of posts on your site—because it’s easier to have a generator I’m intimately familiar with and can adapt however I want instead of constantly learning and relearning how someone else’s tool works. What I do remains to be seen though.