A blog (initially “weblog”) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).

Why a blog?

• To document your journey ✏️📕
   toward learning a new skill, undertaking a challenge, launching your company, getting to know yourself...
• To make money 💸🛩
   by writing valuable content that would benefit an audience and could be monetised...
• ... or both!

In my case it is a great way to motivate myself to finish my side-projects by “officially” bringing them to a close with a dedicated blog post.

Think of each new blog post as the launching ceremony of a ship: you’ve worked hard to build something cool and want to let your audience know about it.

People attending the ceremony might learn a few things and walk away inspired. Some might even decide to build their own aircraft carrier. Others might decide to throw an Electro music party on the deck of the USS Intrepid. Who knows.

Successful launch of a blog post 🍾

I also ran into a number of inspiring blogs about people’s personal journey over many years and it gave me so much value and motivation that I’m sure sharing this type of content can bring value to the table.

What about?

• Stuff you’re curious about, maybe even good at, “Passions”.
• Or content catered to your audience.
• ... or both!

In the case of this blog, several topics should show up in the blog feed, such as (1) Code, (2) Lifestyle, (3) Europe & China. More about my interests in another article.

How To:

Step #1: Purchase a domain
Tools: Google Domains (12€ per year), or one of many other options
How: This is a personal blog, potentially a place to showcase experience and skills, thus I looked for my full name which, luckily, is not very common so the domain www.loicguichaoua.com was available. I bought it via Google Domains since it offered turnkey solutions to start a blog if you book the domain through their service. Note that there exists many solutions to buy a domain name, simply type “buy domain name” in your browser.

Step #2: Choose how you wish to build your blog
Tools: Jekyll (free)
How: There are many solutions that help you create a blog out there. I first considered Wordpress, but concluded that it would be an overkill with all of its back-end features which are not necessary in the case of a simple blog like this one. I then tried Blogger (by Google) but the templates look really old and unattractive. I then turned to digital nomad friends who mentioned Ghost and Jekyll, both light-weight solutions which allow you “to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.” Great.

Step #3: Find a server to host your blog files
Tools: Github Pages (free)
How: Most websites that sell domain names also offer hosting services. In my case, Jekyll offered free hosting on Github Pages, and I am used to using github after studying at 42 Born to Code, so I went for it. Note that you can even try Jekyll locally on your computer to see what your blog would look like (even if you haven’t bought a domain or do not have a server yet).

Step #4: Upload your first post!
Tools: Markdown tutorial, Disqus
How: Uploading a post using Jekyll is very easy, you just need to create a new article.markdown or article.md (same) file and add it to the right folder in your website directory once you’re done writing your article, that’s it! Your new article will then be added to your blog and be visible in your feed. Finally, you can also make it possible to interact with your readers by enabling Disqus, Google or Facebook comments.
Note that you can either edit your website on your computer and upload it to your server, or, if you use my configuration, edit it directly on your Github repository.

Bottom line:

This solution ends up being quite cheap 💸

• Domain name (Google Domains): 12€ per year
• Hosting (Github Pages): 0€
• CMS (Jekyll): 0€

and it’s easy to maintain! 👍