Way back before the rise of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and other social media websites, I used to operate a technical blog called Baudizm. I took it down for several reasons, reasons that I have already forgotten. Now, I have decided to give things a reboot.
The current state of social media and microblogging has left me wanting to go back to running something that I can totally call my own, without any fear of unjust censorship and devoid of unscrupulous marketing being shoved down our throats at every turn. After more than a decade of not operating my own site, it is now time to restart.
My old blog, Baudizm, was originally hosted on Blogsome and ran for several years. Baudizm was a technical blog revolving around technology, debugging, linux and open source, and the like. After I took it down, I unfortunately lost the backup of the content dumped from Baudizm. Regardless, it is not a total loss. Most of the things I've written back in the day would have been obsolete by now anyway. This is an opportunity to start anew, with a fresh new lens with all the recent advances in technology. It is indeed perfect timing. However, if you are curious what it was like back then to read Baudizm, you can still access some period snapshots taken by The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20120118114131/http://baudizm.blogsome.com/ .
After more than a decade of not operating my own site, it is now time to restart.
A NEW BEGINNING
There were several opportunities for me to pick up blogging again. At some point, I tried Medium, Tumblr, Google Plus, Blogger/Blogspot, Life Journal, among others. When I was very much actively pushing Python advocacy, I've even picked up and played with Pelican for a time and used it to generate the previous placeholder page for this website. Unfortunately, it was touch and go most of the time, and one thing led to another, and another, and another, until I totally scrapped working with Pelican altogether. It's not Pelican's fault, mind you. It was great for what it was made to do but it just felt like it was not a good fit with what I was trying to do.
Then I decided to go with Nikola.
Nikola is Python-based and open source like Pelican. It also has themeing, has loads of features, various support for publishing targets (yes, you can even push and automate via Github Actions!), and very much workable. I'm still quite new to Nikola and still figuring out much of the things but I am definitely liking what I'm seeing. It is a neat tool when you don't need a full on CMS like Wordpress, and you don't even need supporting services like databases which can add maintenance overhead for a simple site like mine. It is not an alternative to Pelican or Ghost. It is a worthy first option, not just a replacement.
If you want to check it out and play around, you can get Nikola at https://getnikola.com/ and try it for yourself.