New year, new blog. Getting started with Astro.

The trend to self-hosted and owned blogs is here in full force. Fuelled through Twitter and other social media uncertainties and people wanting their own data back.

Blogging and Twitter

Having dabbled in travel and tech blogging in the past on different sites, dev.to or WordPress – spurred on by the Bring Back Blogs! January 2023 initiative and especially Chris Coyiers blog post about it (Bring Back Blogging - Chris Coyier) I used the time over the holidays to whip-up a new design and fresh blog with Astro. Still a work in progress, but you can read this – right? Means it can’t be that bad.

The Bring Back Blogging initiative’s goal is to, well, get people back to blogging and especially sharing it via RSS. That means having it easily available for any kind of consumption the reader wants to engage in. While I am absolutely on-board with their idea for this bringing energy towards a decentralized, curated, diverse creative collective — just one interesting corner of the internet where we can all pool our networks to lift us all up – I am also just using this as a point to kick start writing more again.

Overcoming the wall

Blogging feels like it has quite the hurdle to get started with. After all, aren’t most blogs full of super interesting and researched articles? Long series or tutorials where you wonder why they are free anyway… like all the gold Josh W Comeau produces (Josh W Comeau)?

But, as Chris Coyier points out. This blog framing is the main culprit, and it can be different:

I wonder if the term “blog” has too much baggage. Too much history for it to really catch on again and make a dent.
Maybe “publish your own feed” is a better framing. “Own your RSS.” A feed doesn’t care what it contains. It is content-style agnostic. It’s just timestamped HTML, in a way. Put some audio in it, and it’s a podcast. A feed could be exactly what you would have tweeted before tweeting became cringe.

So, let’s all relax a little bit. There is room for highly researched multipart series, but there is also space for a fun and interesting short content RSS world.

Not goals but themes

I recently read a quote along the lines of: „Let’s stop creating big goals each year and instead let’s have themes. Like this is the year of Yoga 🧘“.

Following this, I will also go with flavor 🍦 of the year instead of strict goals. But still, you can expect to find weekly posts in this space about everything

• React and NextJs
• Astro
• tRPC and other emerging tech
• Frontend Tooling in General
• Deep Dives in interesting technologies
• #buildinpublic

Looking Ahead

Some might be longer, some might be old school tweet style. Let’s see where we go from here.

If you reached this point – come over and say hello at twitter/mojitane 👋