At the time of writing this post, I've never really written a blog post before, and this is my first. After starting to become more active on Twitter and the dev community as a whole, I wanted to start my own blog.

I always loved writing. From a young age, I would write "stories" that were a couple of thousand words at the most which no one ever got to read — why? I don't know.

Finding a Suitable Platform

Before finding a suitable platform, I had a couple of things in mind;

1. Price

After looking through the popular options like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, all of them had varying price levels with different sets of offers. Some placed ads on your site even if you pay, and some required you to pay for a custom domain.

2. Number of Users

Services like Ghost charge you based on the number of visitors that can sign up on your site, the more users you have, the more they charge you.

3. Others

Others include things like bandwidth limit, storage space, support, and others that were varied at different price points, and the cheaper the plan is, the less bandwidth, storage, and longer response times you get.

Choosing a Software/Service

After taking into consideration these points, I started to look around. Most developers I've seen on Twitter had their start by blogging on sites like Dev.to or Medium and both are great ways to build up an audience.

Then I turned to open-source headless CMS software like OctoberCMS or for a #JavaScript fan like myself, Strapi or Ghost. The only issue here is that most of the time I've seen other developers use these services is just as a database for their articles. More often than not, they have a front-end built with React or NextJS and grab their articles from Strapi or Ghost.

I ruled out building my blogging platform because who has the time for that? But in all seriousness, I would procrastinate and the blog would eventually sit in a GitHub repo collecting dust and I don't want that here.

Hashnode

After looking through Twitter and seeing what people are using, I saw a lot of people using Hashnode for writing blogs. It's free and provides all the cool benefits of a paid platform and even has a community where my blog posts are posted so that I can grow my audience not only on my custom domain but in Hashnode's community as well.