I never wrote up the other repo I actually use the most, which is Hyde, the thing this blog runs on. Btw, now is the time to start YOUR blog, really.
The idea for Hyde started from watching people in proteomics who clearly have something worth saying never actually start writing (no names, but I wish they wrote things). You have blogs like Ben Orsburn’s News in Proteomics Research that are proof that one person writing regularly about whatevers in their brain and their corner of the field can become something people actually read, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. I think Ben has said he started the blog more as a journal to keep notes, and it has mostly been positive for him (you can ask him about that). Others have made outlets more science communication focused, like Amie Solosky (a just defended Ph.D. from Erin Baker’s lab) has a substack, Amie’s Science News, and it is great for her and readers.
Point is, everyone has something to say, and arguably writing more frequently is good for your writing muscles, may be helpful to keep track of things in your brain, may be beneficial professionally, may be theraputic, or maybe even would help others!
For me, the hardest part was the setup: pick a platform, figure out hosting, log into something just to type a paragraph. Sure Orsburn used Blogger but what about something I could control, maintain, but still be helpful (and be free).
Back when I started this blog it was because Magnus Palmblad said we should, and so I just copied what he did (same blog theme, same everything, different name and picture). BUT the roll your owm github repo blog still was a pain to write posts to: bust out the text editor, write in weird markdown, commit and push to my repo, then expect I did something wrong. Despite appearances, I am not that techy, and was even less so then.
So Hyde strips the whole blog experience down to almost nothing. It is a fork of the Reverie Jekyll theme with one addition, a mobile compose screen that writes straight to GitHub through the API. Fork the repo, rename it to yourusername.github.io, turn on Pages, and you have a live blog. Open compose.html on your phone, paste in a personal access token once (I just make a fine grained PAT to this specific repo with read/write content access, and store it on my phone’s password manager), and you can write and publish from anywhere, no app, no server, no separate login to remember.
Drafts, image paste with automatic resizing, a picker to go back and edit an old post, it is all built in, and it is MIT licensed same as the theme it came from.
If you have something to write about (dumb or otherwise) and the only thing stopping you is the setup, Hyde is one way forward. DO IT!!!