I’ve been thinking a while about starting a blog to get various ideas out there in the world, whether they be about programming, music or other things. Getting content out there on ’the web’ might help me promote the things I’m doing, attract likeminded people or people that can help me in my endeavours, and it can help me hold myself accountable to the ideas I get and the goals I set for myself. Possibly it will do none of those things, but it will still help me think ‘out loud’ and allow me to practise putting thoughts into words.
Creating any content whatsoever will also train my content muscle and make me a better content producer, so for now the quality doesn’t really matter. I’ll just try creating as many blogs as possible. (warning to self: that sounds like a goal and accountability). Creating something daily or even weekly might be a bar too high, with the little amount of free time I have these days. I won’t set any goals for now, let’s see where it goes.
The thing stopping me from doing this lately was simply not being able to choose a platform to blog on. I wanted something that won’t cost me too much time and effort, so building my own site in Laravel or Ruby on Rails was out of the question. I’ve tried Wordpress and other more modern content managing systems like Wix, but those just didn’t feel right. Then I came across the Hugo templating system, driven by the Go programming language. I was amazed at first by the speed of it. It was able to render over 18000 pages in under a minute at the company I’m working at. When I looked more into it, I really liked the file structure it forces you to use, so you don’t have to make too many decisions yourself, and the fact that it deals with assets such as CSS and JS/TS for you, and that it allows you to just write pages using Markdown. I was already using Markdown for personal and work related notes, using a pretty cool tool called ‘Obsidian’, so it wouldn’t be a huge adaptation for me to start blogging in Markdown. I also like that is just generates a static site that I can plop onto any hosting platform or even just on Github sites. I also like being able to just Git versioning and not having to rely on some website to edit my content.
For now I’m just using an existing theme to get familiar with Hugo templating, but I’ll probably create my own simple theme at some point. (Uh oh, more accountability). Anyway that’s enough for now.
Some ideas of future blog posts:
- Laying out my ideas of classical music composition. (I already have a draft ready)
- Analysing some pieces using those ideas.
- Implementing a shortcode to display music notation in Hugo. (using Vexflow)
- Talking about the music app I’m working on.
- Discovery and comparison of different existing apps similar to the app I’m building (and how mine’s better).
- Programming related stuff, especially related to Rust.
- Who knows what else…