How to Start Blogging

You are planning to do incredible things. It would be nice if someone else would know about it too. So you decided that you want to have a blog.

Motivation

Who wants to spend hours or days just to setup a blog? Honestly, no one. You either go for a blogging site like a self hosted site engine (e.g. Wordpress), or you use one of the blooging site (e.g. Medium). The first requires a significant learning effort at the start, while the second may have limitations on the eyeballs you can reach (e.g., paywall or ads).

Or you can use Github Pages with the help of a great tool: fastpages coming from the fast.ai powerhouse.

Solution

Fastpages enables you to focus on the content of your blog. You write your posts into a Markdown file (or to a Jupyter Notebook) and you get a nice blog like the one you are reading right now.

Figure out the topic, write the post, and commit to the Github repository of your blog. You are done.

Wish I knew before

  • If you search for blogging and fast.ai you may end up reading about fast_template. Read for about it for motivation and then use fastpages. More flexibility and ease of use.
  • The repository containing the blog should be public, unless you have a Pro subscription (to have Pages functionality on Github).
  • Use quotation marks in the description to avoid Jekyll build failure.