I’ve been wanting to restart my blog for a while now. Creating this one has reminded myself how a bit of coding literacy can unlock - besides a career - some nice little perks to life. I used to run a couple of blogs in the past, using technologies like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, and some others now defunct free services. They might still be alive somewhere, floating about the unindexed web. After doing some research, at this time I chose Jekyll and Github Pages. For now my choice has proved to be a way easier, powerful and more enjoyable option than any of those other services. I still got to choose a nice (and free) template among hundreds. Hosting is really free. Free as in no ads, no trackers, no pop-ups or hidden tricks whatsoever.

This is only possible because Github lets you host static HTML files, as they are, no additions, for free. That alone is cool, but still not easy enough for maintaining a blog comfortably, so it lets you use Jekyll. Jekyll is a static website generator that you can use to generate a beautiful website using your template of choice and manage its content (pages, blog posts, etc) in separate files in a simple and readable text format. From the time taken to choose a template, doing minor tweaks and setting up the domain, I had everything up and running in a couple of hours.

Broadly speaking, the cost lies in having some coding literacy. It requires you to know how Git works, what Github is, some basics of HTML (only if you fancy tweaking your template), a dash of Ruby (to grasp and toy with Jekyll), being aesthetically comfortable with Markdown, being able to scrap some command line commands so you can test and deploy with no fuzz. There are no magic tricks, but requires enough coding skills that might serve as barrier of entry for the vast majority of users out there.

There is a chance that in the future a 100% coding literacy-free version of a blog platform will give you all the benefits - by benefits I mean here, specially, no ads, tracking or pop-ups - with minimal cost. But I don’t feel so optimistic given how monetization has been working on the Internet these days. What makes me optimistic, on the other hand, is the increase of coding literacy among users.

I wonder which other perks I could as well enjoy with my current skills but yet don’t, or which others can I unlock as I learn more.