What's a blog anyway? I was creating website(s) back when I was in grad school, made money for it even (ok, that was for my brother-in-law's site, and as basic as you go, but whatever). All HTML and table colspans, and invisible characters to place things just so. And I loved to write and to tinker, so I would be up and at it at all times. But keeping a static website updated is a lot of work, and I trailed off as I transitioned to software as a career and learning an all new craft.

The arrival of Blogger and WordPress rekindled the desire to write, and I must have begun a few blogs back in the day. Given the techie origins of weblogging itself, those platforms were pretty kludgey, and I think I spent more time coaxing the templates to look like what I visualized rather than actually writing something. I think my best attempt was a blog I set up when my son was born.

Over time, and over the proliferation of social products on the web, I have had the chance to evaluate what it was that compelled me to write. I wrote to maintain a lasting timeline of shares with family, but Facebook pretty much captured that zeitgeist. I wrote to share tidbits I found interesting, but those are largely ephemeral, and Facebook and subsequently WhatsApp have that cornered. I wrote to chronicle my kids' childhood, and I ended up using Facebook that way, because I did not want that to be public. I might have wanted to write to maintain a professional presence, and LinkedIn would be the place for it if that was all I wrote, but that was not me. The coming of Medium at least resolved the kludgey bit. And since I had a vanity site by that point, I tried to make Medium fit into it visually, albeit not too successfully. The paywall too was a turnoff.

Here's what I realized I wanted from my website and my blog:

• I wanted both.
• I wanted both to look thematically the same.
• I wanted a vanity site, but with a few more pages, to have a kickoff point to links and information I frequented, in a wiki sort of manner.
• I wanted enough flexibility to add my own flair to my website, but not so much that it was a lot of work to maintain it.
• In spite of what I said a paragraph ago, I still wanted to write. Occasionally.
• And I wanted to do it all with free tools, even if that meant tinkering a lot more. That's just the engineer in me.

Notion is growing on me as the place to maintain both a website and a blog. It's simple to just get writing; it has enough flexibility with sections and table views to play around and get things just so; and with their free plan now going unlimited, there's no more worrying about size. The suggestions on fruition.com helped make the URLs look tidy, and choose fonts just that bit less bland.

So here's to a blog that's hopefully not abandonware this time around.