This is an awfully good question. It would have been so much simpler to create a new site on any of the hosting platforms out there like Medium or Squarespace. Had I done this, I’d have a relatively good visual design already, an RSS feed, a contact form, the ability for visitors to post comments, possibly greater visibility on Google owing to the hosters submitting my blog to Google (my ancient WordPress.org and Blogger blogs can still be found on Google) and some built-in analytics. All of these features I have to build myself.
Several reasons actually…
Simple really. Blog platforms are good for blogging but I want to host other applications here as well. Kind of a portfolio.
There’s more to this than just churning out blog posts. By doing it all myself I have to take responsibility for hosting, deployments, my domain name, the visual design, site features and the content. Sure, I’m doing it the hard way but that’s kind of the point. I’m a web developer after all.
For now, I’m drawing dependencies on Gatsby and Netlify. Gatsby is an open source product and it’s well used so I don’t have any concerns there. Netlify is also well regarded. I’m well within the parameters of its free tier for now. I don’t yet draw any depencies on anything specific to Netlify, though I expect to use its form submission capabilities for a contact form shortly and may also use Netlify Functions at some point. I’m comfortable drawing these dependencies. I feel I can migrate away from either if required. By comparison, migrating from Medium or Squarespace is a lot more difficult.
So, right now the visual design isn’t too flash and I’m missing a lot of features that a hosted platform would provide. I can live with that and building my site out is quite a bit of fun too. I’m creating something useful and am learning things on the way. It gives me something to write about as well. It gives me a voice. As long as the site continues to improve, well, then things are heading in the right direction.