I've been telling myself for ages to start a blog. On occasion, I've gotten quite close, but I usually end up paralyzed by the number of options available.
I decided to the bite the bullet and just deploy something. I wanted to get up and running quickly but leave room for plenty of control and customization later. Let's take a quick look at where I landed.
Ghost
Ghost is "just a blogging platform." It seems like a more contemporary WordPress, and it runs on Node.js which is good for me, since I'm more familiar with JavaScript than most things. I'm also writing this post in Markdown, which I enjoy.
Ghost has a few paid options where they'll host an instance for you, but I ended up deploying it to DigitalOcean. They make it stupid simple to get started, but I can still ssh in and do whatever I please.
After searching for "ghost themes," I found an abundance of options. Some are free. Some are not. It was quite easy to install themes, so I tried a few out before sticking with a free one called Crisp, by Kathy Qian. It seemed like a simple jumping-off point that I could tweak to my liking.
It turns out it's far more difficult to write a quality blog post than it is to start a blog, so we'll see what happens next.