The number of personal blogs has skyrocketed in the last few years. Just a few years ago, Medium, Tumblr, Blogger, or Wordpress were the go-to blogging platforms. They were easy for anyone to pick up but frequently came with a few serious drawbacks. In 2018 or 2019 we saw personal blogs get a breath of fresh air. Everybody was setting up their own self-hosted blog and in many cases migrating existing content off of the popular blogging platforms. There are a few reasons that come to mind why this is the case.

Owning your own content has proven incredibly valuable. Medium and other blogging services that create paywalls are frustrating to readers and create ambiguity about who owns that data. There are a few high-profile blogs, such as FreeCodeCamp, that have removed their content from a slow, reader-hostile platform and relaunched on their own platform. When you control the content and the experience, you can create your blog the best way for the writers and the readers.

Another force driving the personal blogging scene is just how much easier it is to create a personal blog because of all the hard work put in by the open-source community and the services that support them. What previously would have meant spinning up a LAMP stack on a virtual private server is now taken care of by pushing a Markdown file to a git repo which runs a webhook to tell Netlify to trigger a fresh build and redeploy static HTML, CSS and JS to a CDN. They give this workflow to you and what it requires is gluing some software together that already plays well together.

So to all the library authors and service providers that make this blog and many more like it possible…

I originally got this idea from Nick Taylor who created a great Thanks page on his personal blog. And like all great developers I borrowed his idea for myself.

It’s not required, no one expects it, but it is a nice gesture to acknowledge the hard work done to make all developers’ lives easier.

Thank you!