Building Your Own Website, Once and For All

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they ask themselves, “should I start a blog?” and the answer is, unequivocally, yes. Blogs are a flexible way to communicate or document just about anything. Write reviews for all the blueberry muffins you eat, keep a fictional diary from the perspective of your pet, or other useful things.

The hardest part of blogging, like any hobby, is getting started and being consistent, so it’s important to find an easy way to begin. Luckily there are a handful of Glitch apps that we’ve found so you can just remix and jumpstart your new site.

For someone learning how to code, there’s nothing more efficient than TIL Blog by Cassey Lottman which gives you a skeleton of a blog with all the basic tools you’ll need for jotting down your thoughts including recent posts, archives, and tagging. Also, take a look at Cassey’s blog made with the same structure to give yourself a demo on how it looks in action. If you’re feeling adventurous, maybe change the colors or your font.

Next, you can try Geoglitchies, a simple but sleek looking blog from Jess Lord and Monica Dinculescu, ready for your remix. Who wants to worry about hosting or frameworks, Geoglitchies aims to bring back early blogging like Geocities or LiveJournal where you can make a site for any of your obscure interests. “Remember making a website about dolphins or being able to look at 100 websites about dolphins in a row? This is kind of like that.” Even if you’re new to programming, everything you need to get started is in the “How to configure your site” blog post.

Another option for your writing needs is write.as which is a minimalist, distraction-free tool for publishing—so distraction-free that just like Glitch, you can try it out without signing up! The write.as also has a lot of tools on their Glitch team page so you can work in a way that’s comfortable for you. Remix their README CMS app and use Glitch’s markdown editor to write a post without even opening a new tab.

If you’re looking for something more specific, like just to document your life, then Nice Reads by Tessa Thornton could be a good fit. Originally designed for reviewing books, you can actually just login to Nice Reads with your Twitter account and have your own profile right in Tessa’s app. But why stop there? Maybe you want a place to review local chili cheese fries—or any kind of fry—remix the app and add your own spin to it.

_To keep any of these apps, save the collection for later or add one of them to your My Stuff!

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