Crafting a minimal, fast, but a feature-rich blog

Establish your identity with a blog

Thanks to the internet, people can build an identity that spans countries and continents, opening up new opportunities for you to work and interact with people you would never have met otherwise. Businesses, too, use blogs to establish a presence of their product or service, it also helps them develop a transparent relationship with customers and competitors.

Be creative

Overlooking the technological aspects for a while, it will be your articles that determine whether you grow or fail. All the tactics used to keep people engaged for longer periods of time, such as dark patterns and keywords, may result in a rapid up-sell or more messages. But, they will not develop a genuine and long-term relationship with the reader. Your writing, and only your writing will be valued by the reader.

Stick to a niche - or don’t

Commercial/Marketing blogs are typically focused on a specific topics. Personal blogs, on the other hand, are supposed to create a relationship with the reader, not to make money off of them. Take, for example, my own blog, which covers themes such as privacy, web development, and others. And eventually, I might start writing about my life experiences. So, in the end, the decision is yours.

Buy a custom domain

Your domain is your unique identity on the internet and will be in charge of your website, email address, analytics, and your reputation. Don’t spend too much time thinking about a name or paying a lot of money for a premium name. The domain market wants you to acquire pricey domains that pretend to increase your search ranking. Your meta tags, keywords, or domain names are no longer believed by search algorithms. They’ve refined their AI to examine and sort information appropriately. For a personal blog, try using your first and last names with a .com, .xyz, or your country’s top-level domain and see if it sounds nice.

Understand your tech

There are far too many website builders to choose from, both free and paid. I’ve tried Over 30 different website-building softwares. Each tool having its own set of features, benefits, and limitations. However, almost none of them could give me complete control over the data, hosting infrastructure, security, architecture, and other factors. Although I believe that coding the website yourself is preferable, but if you do not want to learn new skills, you may have to use a website builder or hire someone to code it for you. Don’t be fooled by internet guides into thinking that buying expensive themes and hosting would guarantee you top search rankings.

Loading speed matters

Nobody wants to stare at a loading circle much longer than a few blinks. To have your website load quickly, you must first generate it and then submit it to a content delivery network (CDN). A static site will load much faster than a website built with a website builder like WordPress, as the pages are ready to be served from the closest server. We’ll use Jekyll to generate a static site that can be hosted on Uberspace, Alwaysdata, Codeberg, Netlify, GitLab, and a variety of other services. Some are CDN’s, others are not. We will also explore how to host it on a Raspberry Pi.

Monetize your blog - or don’t

No one wants to work for nothing unless it’s for a cause they believe in. There are a variety of techniques to monetize your blog, some of which are transparent and others which are not. You can learn about dark patterns, which are designed to extract more money than the value they provide. Please evaluate and avoid such tactics when defining the the blog’s design principles.