Up: (blog)
July 16, 2026
After six years without writing a single blog post, I’m back.
Contrary to what this might sound, I actually enjoy writing. Not just code and software documentation, but also novels, which I picked up as a hobby during primary school.
When it comes to blogging, however, my enthusiasm quickly wanes, for reasons even myself can’t fully explain. Perhaps it’s the embarrassment while looking back upon a blog post years later; or maybe it’s the tediousness of expanding an idea or a note into a full article. Either way, blogging does not always feel fun or rewarding, unlike programming.
Yet here I am, looking forward to give it another try!
An old blog post may look embarrassing, but nevertheless comforting to see oneself grow1 throughout the years. In fact, blogging itself could be a source of growth, because when done responsibly, it fortifies one’s own understanding of the topic as well.
As the saying goes, the hardest part of blogging is choosing the right tools. I’m not sure if it’s a joke, but choosing blogging software has never been a problem for me.
When I started blogging in 2016, being a complete tech noob, I chose Z-Blog for the sole reason that my VPS provider offered it as a pre-install option. I soon switched to Hexo, a choice still popular today. Years later I switched to Solo, which I can’t remember why.
Revisiting this topic as of 2026, I’m a little bit more picky about blogging software, or rather, software in general. One thing I learned in the software industry is that we should value simplicity above all else. For a blog engine, that would mean producing clean HTML pages with zero JavaScript and minimal styling from plain text, while understanding just enough markup for technical writing. No fancy web features that would make my laptop fans roar to load a page; no new turing-complete DSLs written in Rust, co-authored by Claude; and certainly no thousands of transitive dependencies from NPM or PyPI.
There are many good candidates, and I’m here to recommend an unpopular one, GNU Texinfo. It’s not a static site generator by itself, but you can easily craft one with a few lines of shell and makefile scripting.
Apart from writing more blog posts (obviously), there are a few other things I’d like to do.
RSS support would be nice, but I’m saving that for later, when this blog becomes worthwhile for readers to subscribe. I’m also going to tidy up the scripts, so that one day I could open-source this blog or even start a new SSG project.
Porting my old blog posts is not on the roadmap, however, you can find them in the Wayback Machine if you’re curious.2