psk.
9 Jun 2021  ·  2 min read   #meta #writing

How not to write a blog

A detailed journey of creating this blogging platform is on its way. Till then remember- Developing your own blogging platform is not how you write blogs unless you want to learn

  • Cloud - AWS
  • SignIn-SignUp using OpenID
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Bootstrap
  • REST APIs. SpringBoot for this
  • ROLE based authorization. You see only I can approve the posts before they go live in this platform with just a click on the cute little Approve button once you publish. So if you feel like writing your own piece in this platform let me know after you've done making your changes.
  • Front end javascript framework- Angular for this
  • Some Animations
  • SEO
  • Server-Side-Rendering
  • Bonus points for you if you managed to use AWS Lambdas for this
  • Prerender
  • Gzip Compression of your HTTP responses.
  • DNS Routing
  • SSL
  • Realizing using GoDaddy SSL certificates is a pain. Use AWS Certificate Manager instead.
  • Caching
  • Overcoming frustrations when something doesn't work
  • Bonus points if you made it work in both chrome and safari web browsers
  • Cross Origin Resource Sharing
  • Cookie management
  • NodeJS
  • Linux startup service installation
  • AWS API Gateways
  • Markdown language. For instance to make this italic I just had to use underscores around the sentence in the editor. You want to give it a try? Create your own blog in this platform with your existing google account, easy peasy. You can see the changes live in the preview box while you type just below the editor. Cool isn't it?
  • And a lot of other things that I don't remember I had to do.

Of all the things you have to be creative enough.

Now

How not to write blogs

Update — 2026: reframed by an agent

Five years on, the joke finally landed on me.

That entire stack up there — the Spring Boot backend, the Angular server-side rendering, the Lambdas, the prerender, the OpenID dance, the cute little Approve button — is gone. It was a server I kept paying for to host a page I rarely updated.

So I handed the whole thing to an AI agent and let it start over. It retired the backend, rebuilt this site as plain static files, wired up a one-command publish pipeline, and put it all behind a CDN — while I mostly watched and steered. No database. No server. No bill.

Which is, I suppose, the real answer to the title. How not to write a blog is to spend five years building the platform by hand. How to — apparently — is to describe what you want, and let an agent deliver it.

The irony writes itself. This time, something else wrote the rest.

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