Day 37 - A brief history of my blogging past and the tools I used

26 Mar 2017 100daysofwriting · jekyll · programming · technology · wordpress · writing

There were some serious production issues in the past couple of posts. The images were not properly downloaded (I downloaded them using wget and that didn’t work out), titles were not right, categories weren’t added. I have fixed all of that now, there was even a spelling mistake, a hilarious one too. I had mis-spelled synced as sinked, I didn’t even notice it when I was typing!

Anyway, the quality of everything should improve from here on out, I am going to visit the post and skim it right after posting. I think I should talk about why I am using Jekyll for this whole series and also as my primary blog when there are much simpler alternatives like Medium out there.

I have been trying to blog for a while now. I first had a Wordpress blog on Wordpress.com. (I logged into it after 3 years with just one password attempt. MEMORY GOING STRONG.)

Anyway, I have just been seeing my posts, and there is a lot of text on that blog. I used to write quite a bit about TV series and things that happen inside IIT Kharagpur. This was about 4 years ago when I had a slower laptop. It was a Toshiba and it choked on running Google Chrome and EiskaltDC++ together. That laptop was the reason that I was using the terminal for almost everything from launching videos in VLC to editing with vim instead of Sublime Text because it was too slow. (It had a Pentium processor, I think with 2 GB RAM. OLD!) Back then, jekyll was just becoming popular with the whole Github pages thing being rather new. So, I found a good theme and got started with publishing on GitHub. There was maybe a 2 year hiatus after which I started this particular series and started posting regularly. In the time in between, I posted semi-regularly, about once in every 3 or 4 months. Wordpress archives [I can’t seem to get a list of all my posts on wordpress, only monthly archives]

In between this, I also used Tumblr. I really wanted to like it. It looked good on browsers and on mobile, I could repost stuff from blogs I follow and post them there. This blog was mostly quotes from the ASOIAF book series which I was reading for most of 2015 and the early part of 2016. I also posted some normal write-ups about the status of my life. I never used the mobile app for posting anything, only for browsing other blogs that I followed, but the interest faded away soon and I stopped posting. I wrote about 40 posts over a period of 10 months from November 2015 to August 2016. The most number of posts were in the first month, and then it came down exponentially. Archive of Tumblr

And, now I am back here since August 2016, I had not written anything before I started this series. I felt really bad about not writing. In March 2016, right before starting my internship, I promised on Medium that I am going to start writing more.

So, I read this essay on medium, and realized that it applied to me. Not the not reading 100 books a year part, I absolutely love reading and will continue to read a lot, but I should start writing, despite not being good at it and all that, one thing that made absolute sense was that I should start writing.

I am sure it was just laziness that caused me to not go through with this particular plan of mine. But I would say that I still had the last laugh, even if it was 9 months later than I had said I would start, I started and now I am 37 days in! GREAT!

TL; DR I used Wordpress, then I used Jekyll for some time before switching to Tumblr for 9 months and then not writing anything for 4 months and finally starting this series on Jekyll.

A brief history of my half-assed past attempts at blogging

Duration	Where?
November 2013 - September 2014	Wordpress blog
September 2014 - October 2015	Jekyll (this blog)
November 2015 - August 2016	Tumblr
August 2016 - February 2017	The Hiatus
18th February 2017	DAY 1

I will now push this post and check if the table was rendered properly. I am 60% confident that it won’t render properly. It has never worked for me on the first attempt! It’s always been a struggle.

EDIT: The 40% won out! I was finally able to write a Markdown table and have it rendered the way I wanted in the first attempt!

POST #37 is OVER