I write one of these stupid “hello, world” posts to kick off every blog I start, to justify starting it to myself. If I had half as much motivation to write posts as I do creating new blogs, this place would be full of content. For the uninitiated, welcome, and here is a brief history of love affairs I’ve had with various blogging platforms:

Blogger

Yes, I started blogging this long ago. Young and ruminative, teenage Crystal found blogging to be a more satisfying release than journaling. Modern Crystal has since password-protected this site so don’t go looking for this one. If you’ve known me long enough you will remember it. ;)

Tumblr

This was short-lived. This mostly contained really shitty photography. I still take really shitty photos. These have all been taken offline.

Wordpress

Link. This was a couple of years ago. I wanted to start a new blog, and being young and naive I decided I wanted to see what this was all about. Spoiler: it’s way more than too much bloat for most needs, especially mine (read: super simple stupid blog). Also I stopped writing, because that’s something I tend to do.

Ghost

Link. This was basically a month ago. I’d known about Ghost since I started my Wordpress site but at the time self-hosting a blog seemed daunting. I’ve since become slightly more skilled so given that I’d been meaning to try it and I wanted to start blogging again, I wentn ahead and set it up.

To be honest, I do like it. It’s smooth, clean, and functional. It does what it needs to do (be a blog) and no more, which was exactly what I was looking for. However…

Hugo

Here’s the catch, so if you just want a website that is what it needs to be (a blog) and nothing more, then what’s the admin dashboard all about? If code doesn’t scare you, then why even bother with abstractions (read: bloat, fluff, girth) that strip away your pure power and reduce it to GUI?

If all you’re running is a blog, why can’t you just have a static site?

Yeah.

I was introduced to Hugo at work, and have been cheating on Ghost in my head since. So we’re here now. I think this is the start of something greater. It would be great if I actually wrote some real content for once, but that’s for another day.

Let’s get this rolling. 👉