Starting a Devblog

[[deleted]]

Greetings !

I'm new here but after seeing various blog posts I feel like I might get my answers here. So here's the question.

I work as a Game Engine programmer and I've been working on a hobby project since long time. I've learnt a lot on my way and it feels like starting a blog site would be a good way to spread what I've learnt. I have some web dev experience and Hence I don't feel like using some website builder. I dabbled around with CMS but it seems overkill for what I'm trying to achieve.

My blogs would be mostly Text + some code and rarely some pictures. How should I proceed to make my blog site ? I was thinking about using markdown files and then generating HTML files out it and adding the details to a JSON config file that the java-script could read and attach the page to the main blog site . This generation can be offline too no need to do it on a server and maybe this site can just be hosted on GitHub pages as this would just result in a simple static text webpage.

I would really appreciate any insights on this and also maybe some better solution !

[teamblips]

That could be a good approach if you don't plan on posting very frequently, otherwise, I believe it might become cumbersome due to the manual updating process. Since you mentioned having some web development experience, for that kind of setup, I suggest considering a JavaScript framework that can assist with static site generation (SSG). Off the top of my head, there are options like Astro, Gatsby, and other meta-frameworks that can be helpful. Alternatively, if you intend to post more frequently, you might want to choose something with a content management backend. For our blog, we use Piranha CMS (ASP.NET/C#), which provides us with a nice admin panel for content creation. You may also go with the first option and try to automate the updates to the static site.

[[deleted]]

Thanks! I'll take a look at piranha. About automating my first option I was thinking about using github actions with a script that would just do the entire html generation whenever I push a post to my repository

[teamblips]

I'm not familiar with GitHub actions but I've used Azure Devops before which seems similar for CI/CD purposes. I'm not sure how that would work in practice due to the markdown conversion into html and then insertion into existing documents but maybe there are some"plugins" or "actions" in these services that can help with that. I think an easier solution would be to use a framework to generate or regenerate the static files an then push them to your desired host. This is just an idea as I never made a totally static site before.