Blog like you are coming home.

Hello blog, eh, I mean, world!

As far back as I can remember, I have always been writing. However, I have never blogged. Probably because I preferred the diary and the pen. Having caught a lot of flak for it from my friends, well-wishers, colleagues and bosses alike over the years, I finally decided to fix that.

But, I had conditions -

• Not much overhead beyond the writing.
• Retain maximum possible control over content, display and offline support.
• Also, I have a technical background so I wanted to learn something out of it.

Note : The first and the third above may be self-contradictory, but I am ok with that.

So I started looking. Now, traditional blogging platforms end up keeping my data. I didnt like that. Plus I havent seen good web-based blog editors. So the web based blogs weren't options I was inclined to try first. Having encountered github blogging in the past and liked what I saw, I investigated it again. Soon, it was clear that the simplicity of a static site was hard to beat. The catch was, Github integrates Jekyl. Now Jekyll is good, but getting Jekyll on windows involves some fiddling and a good deal of ruby. Having recently gone through .Net Core, Scala, Spark, Azure and NodeJs recently in quick succession, I had no appetite for another. A little more looking, and I found Pretzel - a .NET based static-site generator, plus extras.

Thus I settled. (The living-happily-there-ever-after-question has no answers yet.)

• Blogging should be simple. Hence Github pages.
• Blogging i.e. content, display and offline mode should remain in blogger's control. Hence pretzel and not jekyll. Also see here for more details.
• And I get to dig into pretzel and maybe learn about static-site-generators.
• Oh, and I rather liked the Jekyll Hyde Theme.

Therefore, this blog is being served from a Github-pages static site, with the site template taken from the Jekyll theme called Hyde, actually being generated by Pretzel on local machine and getting checked into Github.

I just need to figure out markdown now, and then technically speaking, I am back to write, build, test and deploy. Blog or not, thats like coming home.