So many options…

When thinking about hosting a new blog in 2020 I immediately faced numerous options on how to do it.

These are only a couple of the more obvious choices:

• set up a Wordpress site (either self-hosted or managed),
• use a blog service such as Write.as,
• use GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages for static site hosting,
• use Amazon S3 for static site hosting,
• set up a custom server (e.g. on DigitalOcean) and manage everything yourself

None of those seems to be a perfect fit for my needs. Going with Wordpress would mean to dig into PHP (again); something I have briefly touched back in 2007 and wasn’t looking forward to spend more time with. In addition using a self-hosted variant would have the same challenges as setting up a custom server (see below). If using a managed Wordpress service instead, you will be restricted by the features offered from the provider. The same is true when using a blog service such as Write.as, which might offer additional, pre-selected features if you are willing to pay (more).

Looking back

I was always tinkering with technology. My first hands-on experience with PCs took place back in the late 80s. At that time affordable PCs were still big iron (when comparing to todays standards) featuring a small harddrive, some single digit MB of memory and a very limited graphic adapter, which maxed out at a resolution of 320x200 and 256 colors.

I used to run MSDOS, squeezing out the last bit of enhanced memory available in the machine by tuning the config.sys. I played around with different graphical user interfaces on top of MSDOS (most notably GEOS), and started to learn programming languages (initially QBasic and very soon Turbo Pascal).

Eventually I moved to Windows 3.1 in the early 90s mostly for the productivity tools, but refer back to MSDOS for gaming and hacking the machine (in Turbo Pascal most of the time).

I never got a big fan of Windows 95 and its successors, so I started playing around with different OSses such as OS/2 and SuSE Linux, which was coming in a big box containing a handful of CDROMs and an awesome getting started manual, during the rest of the 90s.