Starting today, I’m going to be hosting my blog on Notion. For the last few years, I’ve been using Github Pages as my main source of truth, mostly because I wanted really fine-grain control over all of my content (down to the literal blog frameworks / deployment systems that were used to support the blog).
But the tradeoff with owning all of my stuff is that I have to maintain all of my stuff [1]. And maintaining stuff sucks unless you’re supremely motivated or, better yet, you get paid for it. Since I’m not getting paid to write yet, I have to be doing it because I love writing about random things (‼️).
However, conflating a hate for maintenance with a love of writing almost guarantees less stuff gets written. Every time I want to write something, I’m tired of figuring out styling issues, or figuring out how to get mermaidjs working with my blog, or figuring out how to host assets like photos/diagrams with Github easily (hint: it sucks and it’s more tedious than it should be).
With Notion, it’s truly a great drag & drop experience, and everything feels like it just works. Plus with all of these integrations, “blocks”, and “databases”, I feel like I could truly house everything on here, not just my blog.
At the end of the day, there’s less technical configuration stuff in the way of getting my content out, and the features Notion comes with are pretty nice [2]. It’s really the words and ideas I want to spread, not so much my static-blog-configuration abilities [3].
- I was so obsessed with owning everything at one point that there was a point I had a static landing page that I built in React and deployed with Netlify, which linked out to my Jekyll blog and my Blogspot blogs. I will be moving all of that content into this blog, because single sources of truth rock 🙂
- The haters will say, “But you have to pay for Notion!” and I’m fine with that at this point in my life. I think paying for quality software these days is worth it if you have the means to.
- My old site is still available at jezhou.github.io. I’ll make sure I update the website with a casual update saying Notion is the new source of truth.