An Attempt to Start Blogging Again

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 21:46:00 -0700

Some time ago, I had a self-hosted blog that I had started it in 2009. I had a lot of spare time then and ran the blog software on the Mac mini, that resided on the shelf of my parent’s apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine. All posts there were written in Ukrainian, and I was trying to keep the blog alive for a decade or so. Since then, many things have changed; I lost the grip and did not have enough time to maintain this home setup and share my thoughts, ideas, and details of my hobbies.

Now, I’m feeling confident enough to attempt to start blogging again. When I started to explore possible ways to spin-up a blog again on some blogging services or give a try to one of many self-hosted solutions, I’ve discovered that the landscape of blogging has dramatically changed recently.

It appears that everything is moving in the Fediverse direction, and I like this. Furthermore, I think that self-hosted solutions are not for me anymore, mainly because of an insufficient amount of spare time. Since my initial blog was started, many things changed: I became a father, moved to a different country, and now I’m trying to build a professional career I dreamed about all of my life. So, blogging for me and all those supporting this hobby thing should be relatively easy and should not require all of my leisure time.

I’ve decided to write posts in English, so this will increase the amount of time I need to spend on blogging, since English is not my home language. My English writing skills require some improvements, so I thought that blogging might be a good practice to improve them. As of now, I need to spend additional time on grammar checks and proofreading. This is a bit hard for me yet, even though I’m able to use all this AI stuff from Apple and Google to make these things easier.

In the end, I decide to choose Micro.Blog as a platform to spin-up my new blog. Here are the key points for me of this service:

Micro.Blog is a managed service. This allows me to save time compared to self-hosting solutions;
It’s small;
It’s part of the Fediverse;
Supports cross-posting everywhere I need (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads);
I’m able to write posts and publish them from the Ulysses app;
Very thin and simple platform that meets all of my needs.

So, without any future delays, let’s start this blogging journey.

hobby on Serhii's Makarenko Blog

An Attempt to Start Blogging Again