I Guess I'm Hosting My Own Blog Now

I've decided to move away from publishing on Qiita and dev.to in favor of hosting my own blog. That's this blog. I have migrated over all of my old articles, and at least for the coming year I'm going to write everything here, on MichaelCharl.es/Aubrey. Depending on how things go, I'll either keep this up or switch back to Qiita and dev.to in about a year from now.

Why I Used Qiita and dev.to

For the past few years, I've been publishing technical content on Qiita (in Japanese) and dev.to (in English). I opted for using existing services over hosting my own content for a few reasons:

• Zero maintenance - Using an existing service means I only have to worry about writing articles.
• Built-in SEO - I often find that my articles are the first thing to pop up on Google when I publish to dev.to and Qiita.
• Built-in Community - Both services have a built-in community that helps my articles get seen.

Why I'm Switching (At Least Temporarily)

If I'm being honest, the main thing that prompted me towards doing this is having my articles blocked on Reddit. There are subreddits that block dev.to articles due to them being considered low-effort and spammy. I don't particularly agree with this view: there are a lot of low effort posts on dev.to, but there's good stuff there as well. However, it got me thinking.

• Maybe I'm wrong about the SEO thing. It's possible that my articles from my own blog could gain traction on Google. I certainly won't know unless I try.
• Once it's done, there's not much to maintain, especially if I rely on serverless services like Vercel.
• It looks more professional. It is true that every person starting out their journey as a developer tends to write their blogs on dev.to. Hosting my own blog might lend a little bit more credibility to my posts. Maybe.
• The Reddit thing. As mentioned, some subreddits block dev.to.

The Stack

I mean, this is a tech blog, so I might as well talk about the stack as I'm using it.

• Next.js - I'm using it elsewhere, so using it here makes development smooth.
• markdown-it - I like the way markdown-it-ruby handles adding furigana for Japanese text. {開発は|かいはつしゃ} gets rendered 開発はかいはつしゃ.
• gray-matter - For parsing my .md files.
• Vercel - Because it makes deploying Next.js super easy.

Future Plans?

I'm going to try it for a year and see how it goes. Some features I'm considering:

• More categories? Right now the only category is code, but I'm thinking of adding other categories such as music or headphones.
• "Related posts" suggestions based on tags
• Reaction buttons, maybe? I like it on dev.to when someone "likes" my post, it shows me that I actually helped someone.
• View count, and/or analytics. I'm currently getting analytics via Vercel, but again I would really like some metric for how much reach my articles are getting.

But I'm trying not to over-engineer things from the start.