An Easy Blog - Vladimir Dietrich's Blog

For a long time, I wanted to have a blog as simple as creating a Google Doc, even from my cell phone.

I already had a blog. But I needed to edit the HTML directly and then update it on GitHub.

Why a blog?

I agree that being able to post on Facebook or Instagram may not seem necessary to have a blog.

Or even being able to post on Medium.

And so I did, for quite some time: I made several posts on Medium (you can check them out here), on Facebook, even on Instagram where texts, my favorite media, are less valued than photos and videos.

But some things changed over time.

First, Medium started charging to receive posts and even to be able to read them. That's okay: they decide how to sustain the tool.

Not long after, Facebook started prohibiting very long posts. Another problem.

Another problem with Facebook, for me, was the difficulty for me to revisit very old posts.

I ended up creating my blog draft, which I edited directly in HTML. I wanted something simple, and simple it is.

But it wasn't that simple to create an article. There I was editing even the simplest tags: “p”, “h1”, “img”. Paragraph by paragraph. And I updated it on GitHub, which hosts my sites.

Finally, this week, I created a new subdomain: https://blog.vladi.dev and now this blog feeds only on Google Docs that I create in a specific folder of my Google Drive.

Finally, I can just type texts on my cell phone, even, and that's it: every dawn, a script checks for news in the folder and automatically updates my blog on GitHub. And I have a new article published on my blog.

It became so simple that there was time left to ask an artificial intelligence to create an image for me, at the top, in case I don't put any image at the top of my Google Doc myself.

I still like to write my texts directly on Facebook but, now, at any time I can capture one of these texts and create an entry in my blog: just put this text in a Google Doc.

Thank you to those who still follow some of my texts. Welcome to this new way of posting ☀️.

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Update: now the blog translates and posts in other languages, too, just by asking in the text “version in (any language I want)”.