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How to build your own blog in 2020 today

drew.tech on January 23, 2020

Why I'm blogging I'm blogging to improve my writing, increase the clarity of my thoughts, and show what I'm working on. With each blog ...
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Miranda

Thanks for sharing this! I want to add to the 'features' the importance of picking a topic that makes your blog easy to understand for a different person.

I just started my blog this month, Books on Code, and I'm still feeling out the core message.

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Tom Weston

Just checked out your blog! I love the design of the site (great colour scheme) and the content is really high quality as well!

I read your post on bad practice in HTML and found it to be a entertaining read, I also really enjoy the Head-first books, their Android Development book was the only one I could finish on the subject.

Just thought I'd give you some positive feedback and let you know I've signed up to the newsletter and look forward to reading your posts.

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Miranda

Wow, Tom, thank you so much! And welcome to the newsletter. Glad to have you aboard.

For the blog design, I started by building it from scratch, but after doing a bit of reading on blogs, I scratched that idea and used Squarespace to get something out immediately and evolve it as I went. Basically any small business who goes to me looking for a site, I tell them to just make a Squarespace site and to not stray far from the templates and example pages; if they do that, they can look like a designer. 😁 So I just took my own advice.

That said, my thought with the color scheme was this: a pinkish orange is cozy and nurturing, which is a color I do not see at all in tech (so breaking some norms!). But the dark backgrounds of the blog posts brings it back to a more traditional tech look. I chose big fonts and typography since a problem in software topics is that we only have so many stock photos of people on computers. The DEV community gets that, too, and is smart for including only headlines in its feeds.

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Supun Kavinda • Edited

Here's how I've built my list:

  • Googled something and couldn't find the answer
  • Found an answer, but it was buried deeeeep in a forum
  • Notes from a good book or podcast
  • Predictions
  • Learning in public and documenting

This part is interesting :)

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kethmars

Thanks Drew. Nice points you brought out. Also, I just loooove the design of your blog.
I recognized myself at "Easy deploys" :D! I built the MVP of my new blog using Gatsby and StrapiCMS, but don't have any automated deploys in place. Atm, I find it much easier to just post to Dev.to and later just copy the content to my blog...I'd like to make it the other way around in the long term, but for that "Easy deploys" seems crucial...

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drew.tech

Thanks!! I've used Strapi before. What do you think of it?

Be sure to mark your canonical URLs in dev.to so you don't get a SEO penalty for duplicate content.

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kethmars

Ty for the tip. Will make use of it!

Regarding Strapi...I'll probably write a longer post about it sometime, but atm I'm impressed. It's lightweight, functions properly and all functions it's lacking can be more-or-less easily be written by yourself through plugins or Bootstraping + the community is really helpful.

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drew.tech

I like the ability to extend Strapi. That’s what made it attractive to me. Glad you’re enjoying it!

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

I don't think that building a blog with Gatsby is truly from scratch, though. It does need some tweaking to make Markdown with YAML front matter works.

The less work might be something like Jekyll, although some content management might help if your content grows.

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drew.tech

My blog journey started with learning Gatsby while blogging which was originally too much work. Now that I know Gatsby I’m comfortable with it.

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Dmitrii Pashutskii

Nice article, can relate on that and especially about less is more.

Yesterday I decided to setup my old blog locally and tweak it a bit, but I totally forgot that it has auto-setup which creates dummy posts at Contentful and eventually it leaded that I re-write some of my old posts there.

I ended up completely re-setup my blog and make it very simple this time. Moved all my posts to markdown instead of Contentful and take very easy theme to make the looks of the blog much nicer and add a lot of abilities to tweak it out in the future.

Feels really nice, I'm happy. I hope it'll lead to much more writing this year.

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drew.tech

Nice - I'm all for simple. Good luck on the writing more this year!

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Davide de Paolis

very very nice article! I also started many blogs on different platforms over the years. Blogger, Wordpress, now Dev.to, but since i'd like to own more the content I just need to jump on the Gatsbty thing .

The graph about the compound effect positive vs negative is amazing :-)

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drew.tech

The graphic is from James Clear. He wrote Atomic Habits - I’m a big fan of his.

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Paulo Lopez

Whoa! 🙌🙌🙌 Amazing! I have been shy about writing even about simple things. But thanks to you I will start little by little. Thank you for sharing your knowledge to help newbies like me. I will pass along the help you have given me. Remember;

"The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away."
-- Pablo Picasso

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Jingles (Hong Jing)

Alternatively, we can build our DEV in 2020.

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drew.tech

I always post my content to dev 🙂 love this community.

I keep the content on my blog mostly for SEO & longevity.

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Lisa Sy (she/her)

I'm definitely a big fan of Gatsby, too. I went from Middleman to Gatsby and it had been such a satisfying transition!

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drew.tech

Love the performance too! 🙂
gatsby performance

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Idan Shoshana

Very nice article!
Blog building added to my to-do list 😁

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drew.tech

Thanks for reading!

Don’t feel pressured to blog, though. I’ve always loved writing so it’s a hobby I don’t mind. Be sure to spend time doing stuff you enjoy 😊

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HiJoe

When i click that Deploy to Netlify its build fails.

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drew.tech

Hi Joe! I’ll look into that right now. The link just deploys this repo novela github

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Alexis Ortiz Ojeda • Edited

Hi Drew! I don't think you link to your blog in the article. Is it at developerspin.com? Thanks!

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drew.tech

That’s correct! Thanks for catching that.

This post is at developerspin.com/Building-your-ow...

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Mighty

When I found some interesting idea to write, i keep a note in my notion. It then very easy to manage and I will not forget anything.

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drew.tech

I love notion! Would still be using it if it had zapier integrations.

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gilbert-256

Thanks for the brilliant teaching

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drew.tech

Thank you for reading! What’s one thing I could change to make the article more useful for you?