This post might come across as a hastily put together mashup of thoughts, but that is because it is one. The sole reason for me writing this post is because I am excited by my findings in the last couple of weeks to no end; I do not tend to think in an orderly fashion when I am excited.

For the longest time, I have scratched my head over a good set of tools for a tech blog. I regularly use WordPress, but as a developer, I hate dealing with its dashboards. The need for me to have to deal with settings and buttons to make my blog presentable seemed like overkill. The online editor for WordPress feels clunky. I know I can write posts offline and then paste them into the editor, but then I have to spend time editing it so that it looks and feels exactly the way I want it. I mean, yes, WordPress does have some great plugins and features, but I was looking for none of that. I just needed a no-frill place to write, which would still render my blog neatly.

I did try Medium, of course. It has a simpler interface, the pages look great on mobile and the blog looked clean with minimal effort. But slowly, Medium turned away from being a blogging service to a TL;DR Facebook. In addition, there is this . Enough to put me off, if you ask me.

I experimented with hosting my own service, with static pages, using Hugo . It gave me control over how my blog was rendered, and data used. But Hugo, for all its benefits, does not cater to bloggers as its central target audience. As a result, maintaining a blog involved jumping through hoops for things that might seem trivial to bloggers. I hated having to come up with HTML pages for every post, and having to deal with drafts like a caveman.

Incidentally, I was fooling around with MarkDown for documentation at my workplace. MarkDown felt like home. I love writing my documentation in a syntactical manner. Call me a sadist, but there is a genuine satisfaction in not having to deal with buttons and drag-and-drop (yuck) to format text the way I want. If only there was a way to write my blog in MarkDown …

Enter GitHub Pages - A god-sent blogging tool for developers.

It is hosted by GitHub, whose privacy statement makes it clear that I own my content. None of that sneaky attempt to steal content that I generate.

With Jekyll, GitHub pages gives you the nuts and bolts of a blogging tool, without all the annoying dials and switches.

I can write offline in Markdown and push using Git - something I can only dream of with other blogging services. Atom is a fantastic text editor with MarkDown and Jekyll friendly plugins that would make life even easier.

I have no idea why I did not come across this holy trinity sooner (GitHub Pages, MarkDown and Atom) but now that I have, you can bet I am not leaving for a very long time.