Appendix A Publishing and writing resources
This appendix discusses options for publishing your blog posts, as well as tools to help you create and optimize them. All tools that we mention offer a free tier (at the time of writing, at least) unless otherwise noted.
A.1 Where to post your posts?
If you’re not contributing to a company blog, where do you publish your blog posts? Here’s a quick look at popular options: your own blog, Medium and friends, Substack, and publications with a lightweight editorial review/approval process (e.g., HackerNoon and DZone).
A.1.1 Build your own blog site
If you plan to write a number of articles beyond your company blog, strongly consider standing up your own site. In addition to hosting your blog, this site can include your bio, links to projects, talks, and articles, and whatever else you’d like to showcase. This option gives you complete control over every element – from plugins, to look and feel, to what’s shown alongside each of your articles. Build it however you like, with whatever frameworks you want an excuse to play with. Static site generators are popular options for blogging.
Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) is a popular combo for minimalist sites. Since GitHub Pages is powered by Jekyll, you can deploy a Jekyll site using GitHub for free, with a custom domain name.