Bad XP with self hosted Blog
I hosted for many years my own blog on different blogging engines. I can't even remember the name of the first one, but for the last 10 years it was running on Wordpress. My blogging XP has been much the same since then.
Instead of producing content, I got distracted to keep the blog running, secure and alive. Most common tasks included updating Wordpress, Plugins and themes. After the updates came the phase to fix broken stuff. Mostly plugins not working well with the theme...etc.
In 2019 I decided to change that as I want again to be able to focus on producing actual content instead of maintaining a website running.
Choosing alternative
The first thing I did was to ask on twitter and I quickly abolished my initial idea to use Medium.com. Medium.com with their request to sign up and ask to be paid to view content was definitely a point that seemed weird to me and after feedback on twitter, this was the main point not to use medium. Example
The other suggestions to switch to a static site generator got my full attention as well and I investigate 2 potential candidates. The overhead of keeping a static site online looks much lower than keeping wordpress up and running. The candidates where GoHugo and Gatsby.
From the 2 i retained Gatbsy as I was closer to the stack I like. 'Go' seems interesting, but somehow not something that gets me motivated to spent time with.
Along came Dev.to
However while I was playing with Gatsby, I though on dev.to. Strangely nobod suggested this on twitter? I was already a big consumer on this platform, but I never took the time to see what it was about. I follow the Practicaldev twitter account and I like it. I searched for information on dev.to which I have to say are not easy to find, but it was after listening to the podcast on 8Changelog by Ben](https://changelog.com/podcast/310) on OpenSourcing the DEV community that I decided that using dev.to would be much easier than anything selfhosted to publish without giving up on anything.
Selling points of Dev.to for Developers as publishing platform
- Platform Community (removes need to cross post)
- Mardown writing (No need to worry about layout, good control of layout..)
- Endless options for publishing targeted at developers (reference repo, codepen embed....)
- I can align with Code of Conduct
So this is my first post and I am still learning the endless options for publishing. I use the BETA editor and writing this post was a much better experience than publishing on wordpress before.
About Dev.to
Just in case somebody is looking what Dev.to actually is and where they want to go I suggest the following links.
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