How can you start your own blog?

As an engineer, I always wanted to set up a blog site to put my thoughts into words. This is pretty easy to achieve these days. You can get yourself a working blog in no time. Let's list out the different options available to you before we proceed further.

Option 1: Readymade blogging Websites

This is the easiest option available. You can get started by using blogging websites like blogspot.com or hashnode.com and set up your blog in no time. There could be more similar options.

They provide you with a subdomain that uses their site's domain for example a site in hashnode can be like "sandeepbhat.hashnode.dev" by default. Some of them let you attach the site to a custom domain that you might own.

In my case, I own the domain "sandeepbhat.co.in". I created a sub-domain called "blog.sandeepbhat.co.in" under my existing domain by adding a new DNS entry of the type A record. What this means is that you could attach your blog created in say hashnode to point to your domain or sub-domain. I will show how my current setup is done with easy steps to replicate.

Pros:

• Best in class tooling for editing blogs or writing blogs which includes Grammarly etc.

• Easy to use.

• Needs no user management for hosting needs. Hence no separate payment or maintenance for hosting the blog.

Cons:

• Watermark of the website provider.

• Need to upgrade for more features or to remove watermarks.

• Cannot customize beyond what is made available.

Option 2: Custom blog

This option is for those who are more hands-on and want to build something from scratch. This can be time-consuming if you are doing it for the first time.

I for one ended up doing something like this with a difference. My portfolio site is self-hosted and managed from the ground up but my blog is hosted on hashnode. I did this using a single domain which I bought on GoDaddy (sandeepbhat.co.in).

So my portfolio site is up at sandeepbhat.co.in and my blog is at blog.sandeepbhat.co.in

Pros:

• A portfolio site made ground up lets me customize it to my taste instead of it being hosted on a readymade site where it can get drowned in a sea of other portfolio sites.

• Blog hosted on hashnode helps me save time with the tooling it provides and I was not too interested in customizing it much. Blog involves lots more changes frequently as you publish more blogs whereas a portfolio site need not be updated frequently.

• Working in a CI/CD Platform company (Harness.io) I wanted to ensure my portfolio site has CI/CD integrated as well. I achieved this using Netlify where-in I push updated code to my repository in GitHub and this triggers a build and deployment to Netlify. All without even a separate "build and deploy" button to click.

• A single domain name saves me from additional costing as well. GoDaddy lets you configure a sub-domain which you need to set up in Hashnode as well. This sets up the necessary A record.

Cons:

• Time consuming.

• Need to integrate multiple tools manually like mailchimp for mailing or DISCUS for comments, etc.