Its been 19 years since I started my first blog. I created it using “My Opera” service in 2005. What a strange time it was! I was a fresher in college, internet was painfully slow, Hi5 was the favorite social network in my circles and iPod nano was the hottest new product. Things have changed a lot since then but my blogging habits have remained more or less same.
On the technical side, I moved from ‘My Opera’ to wordpress around 2009 and hasn’t changed since. Although I dabbled with ghost in 2013 and tried making my own blogging platform in 2019, I never had a working blog outside wordpress in the past 15 years. The only big change I did was to move my wordpress site from ‘wordpress.com’ to my own server with a custom domain in 2018. On the content side, I have always posted sporadically about various topics of my interest ranging from personal updates, technology, programming/coding, urban planning, geography, etc. I don’t post as often these days but do feel the need to sit down and write a long post on things I know and want to ramble about. As I am becoming more academically inclined in my job, its only a matter of time before I am forced to write regularly.
All of that that being said, I am finally moving away from Wordpress this year. I am doing this primarily to simplyfy the ‘blog’ setup. In the last 15 years of wordpress, my knowledge of web development and the front-end stack has evolved quite a lot. At this point, I think we don’t need as many moving parts (database, PHP, plugins, user accounts etc) for running a simple, minimal blog. Moreover, choosing a static blog doesn’t mean we have to give up on useful things such as componets, virtual DOM etc. With frameworks such as react, vite, etc. we can use the latest advancements in web-development while compiling the final output as a static site. After looking around for while, I have decided to give ‘astro’ a go. The aim is to develop the blog locally in my laptop, render it as a static website and serve it directly from GitHub.
Although, I am tempted to move all my previous work from various old blogs here, I have to be admit that it is a disproportionate amount of effort without justifiable benefits. As I get busier and busier every day, chances of this blog getting any of my old work is almost zero. So rather than wasting time on it, I am going to focus more on writing more and regularly this year. The content of this blog is going remain the same as before - A collection of knowledge, opinions and ideas in the realm of Urban Planning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Geography and Artificial Intelligence. I am also going to make the posts weekly and prefer long form content over short ones. I also want to do more explaination, theory style write-up as opposed to doing tutorials.
Happy new year and see you soon!