Blogging has been popular since earlier days of the internet. I also created a set of uncountable blogs to make my own writings before I started my career on software engineering. Blog for geeks is a topic that will help you to create a blog as a software engineer, web developer, or any kind of person who is deep diving into the section of technology and loves to build things from scratch.
Why do we blog?
We blog because we care. I blog for me because I will forget some of these notes when I need them. I cannot browse the internet for a couple of times and use some deduction that these contents are verified and usable or not. The only thing I want to take care is "ok, the problems begin again. Find on my website, put it in and solve the problem. DONE".
There are a lot of reasons to create a blog. At least some want to get some pocket money by creating the topics that anyone will get interested. Some want to add some reputation on LinkedIn and resume. Some also want to impress other devs about how much they are proficient in specific field that they belong to.
Building your own system - should we?
Many developer over engineer on this thing. When they start to create a blog, they are much more focused on which technology they will use than which topics should they write or they want to create. Then, they are finding the best way to create a blog. They browse Google, ChatGPT, reaching out friends for opinions, and even browsing libraries(just very few) to get the perfect blog. However, they are much emphasize on tech stack than topic. Technically, they forgot how to use SEO.
Anatomy of a blog
The anatomy of a blog is much wider than publishing the blog posts over the internet. These things can be done using social medias and some easy peasy publishing platforms. A blog must contain categorizing the posts, menu management, topic management, SEO, and taxonomy but not limit to them only. These are essential to the first day of your blogging journey begins. You must know how a blog works before deep diving to the ocean of the blogging systems.
Think as a Client
If your main business is blogging, then you should also think that thing as a client. Whatever tech stack you are choosing, it is useless unless it is performing extremely lightning fast. If your blog is slow, customers will gone, potential leads will gone, and even your beloved search engine will not index your posts for your future wannabe customers and clients.
In this case, we are working fast to write instead of creating a universal perfect blogging platform. Then, we have to focus on write as soon as possible.
Choosing the easiest way to blog...
There are a lot of off the shelf applications. You can use cloud solutions or self-hosted solutions. The first three on the list is Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. They are built on PHP and they can perform very well based on many criteria. You may know this thing but your brain will think one thing. IS PHP GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOUR BELOVED BLOGGING WEBSITE.
PHPhobia
PHP Phobia is one of the thing over the internet, especially for any kind of developers. They want to create a new beloved technology awesome blog and they are fear of missing out if they use PHP. PHP had lost some reputation on slow website and resource consuming compared to other programming languages. If this still reflects you, you are in insomnia and hallucination.
PHP is fast evolving per version and now really fast enough to handle enterprise level applications with high speed. Then PHP should not be a problem. We should only worry for how fast can we write per day without touching any complicated tools to make the readers available.
Let's see the person before you do.
WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are widely available over the internet. They are available from shared hosting to enterprise cloud solutions. Aljazeera is using Wordpress VIP and NextJS for frontend to serve fast and better delivery of news to all consumers around the world. (View: How Al Jazeera Built Their Digital Experience Using Headless WordPress) . BBC world service has been used a PHP based framework named Laravel to serve news better. This website currently you read is also build with just a Drupal. Then there is no worries about how to publish your blog faster after you have some amount of highly reputable million number of visitors.
Initial Customers
We forget one thing from reality. Do you expect how many visitors does your blog will get? I am really expect a high number from a thousand to a million but sad reality is I ended up two to three visitor and some day there are none. You have to invest on your writing instead of making your beautiful and no content website.
UI/UX
This is the easiest way to tell. There are a lot of themes for Wordpress on a marketplace. Choose one and viola, your beloved multimillion blog is up.
Conclusion
If you have to build a blog to create your reputation, choose an easy solution. For fast and easy solution, I choose Wordpress, Drupal or even Joomla and get a VPS or even shared hosting to cover the costs. There is nothing to worry about templating and themes.
We need to focus on how can our text enlighten and support our fellow developers around the world. This is much more important than a very beautiful and useless website with no content.
I give you an opinion, then the rest is yours. Create a blog using yourself or consult with me. JUST DM on Linkedin (PRESS HERE).