Just mail it in

Why I made my own blog platform because I hated WordPress, Ghost, Markdown, Hugo, Jekyll, Netlify, and everything else out there

How do you say it?

I like blogging. I absolutely hate setting up a blog.

Let me backtrack. I like blogging but I used to absolutely hate setting up a blog. I have since built something to make me enjoy blogging again.

This pic totally has my energy!

I hated downloading Wordpress, installing php, then MySQL and Apache, then opening firewalls, and watching Google Analytics forlornly as NO ONE EVER came to my site.

I hated using Ghost because it felt so pretentious and snooty.

I hated the thought of paying $29/month to let Ghost host my blog and I didn’t want to pay whatever amount WordPress wants to host my site. And why the hell are there so many, many, many options for WP hosters?

I hated the idea of writing posts in Markdown, shipping it off to Git*, then triggering some sort of action to convert the .md file to .html, then having some other job copy the html files to my blog. So much synchronization and if you so much as missed one closing markdown tag, the entire page would look weird.

I was never happy with Jekyll and Hugo either. It felt so odd to write posts in a text editor where there is not obvious hierarchy of typography. And the less said about embedding images and vectors in Markdown, the better.

So I built my own blogging platform

So I built my own blogging platform.

It uses Gmail, Vuejs, S3, Cloudfront caching, and a couple of lambdas to provide a fast and fully serverless and database free way of hosting blogs.

Now I have

1. the flexibility of a WYSIWYG editor via Gmail (an improvement on Markdown)
2. with built in support for inline images (also an improvement on Markdown)
3. and backups — your posts live in your Gmail sent folder! — your posts aren’t hostage to some other company (an improvement on third party…