I had pretty much forgotten about this website, except for the renewal period of the domain name and the RamNode bill at the end of the year. For context, the domain and the site was set up circa summer of 2016, and then on a long hiatus since 2019 until now. Considering that the billing was set to auto-renew, I checked the year-end renewal notice email, thought for a bit that I need to do something about this and then moved on. This was every December for the last 8 years. I am happy that it didn’t expire and the Ghost blog setup on my RamNode was still kicking. I figured that this setup isn’t helping me out though. It’s not that it was cumbersome, just that the blog hosted on RamNode with Ghost felt too heavy-handed for something meant to serve much simpler aims. So I had a look around for a personal website setup when I got some spare time earlier this year.
There are honestly too many options to list out and I am nowhere near an expert in any of them. Instead, I borrowed this setup from other sites that I have seen and landed on Astro + Frontmatter hosted on GitHub. The setup is fairly basic, allows me to create Markdown content with Frontmatter locally and push to GitHub. The RamNode instance can be used for better use cases going forward. Frontmatter allows me to manage the content and it’s highly recommended.
Anyways, I am happy that I could bring along my posts as is from the previous decade. True to the saying, the days go by slowly but the years go by fast, I have no idea where the time went. Considering the failing memory as we grow, the only way to know that we did something is to document or share it. Otherwise, until rejogged from memory, that particular experience remains dormant for good. Hopefully, the current setup helps me to write at a good cadence on my experiences and ideas!
I honestly don’t know what I will be writing about. Perhaps more on travel or distributed systems or badminton (my new found love). But, I would rather publish my imperfect thoughts rather than wait for a polished post. It just so happens that I get my ideas for the blog when I am immersed in something else. So might as well distill what I can from that short imaginative burst later on and push it out to the world. Also, certain life events, moving countries, changing jobs, and rediscovering hobbies over the last few years made me realize how much I wished to have documented those moments. So here’s to new beginnings once more!