Blog history & infra

I’ve been playing around with blogs for some time now. However, the medium and level of interest has changed over the years. This page details how my blog has evolved over the years and what I’m currently using to host it.

Infrastructure

Right now I’m using simple.ink to host this blog. This reflects in the domain. I may upgrade to a premium tier in the future, and then this will be probably hosted on my own domain, but right now I don’t think its necessary.

Simple.ink connects to Notion, and turns publicly available Notion pages into a website page. There are SEO benefits to this, but the main benefit is accessibility. It gets rid of Notion’s ugly public URLs and subdomains.

I’m still figuring out how it works exactly. My notion workspace looks like this:


Ideally simple.ink would convert all of this into a website automatically. However it doesn’t. It seems like I have to publish each Notion page manually, and feed it into simple.ink. That’s not ideal, but not worth changing providers just yet.

Correction: simple.ink can do this if you provide them with credit card details, and they will still do it for free.

Data Collection

I wanted to create a subscription form for people to put in their email addresses and subscribe. This is being done through an integration with Tally. I tried simple.ink’s own form builder, and also tried notionforms.io. All had identical creation processes, but I was most impressed with Tally’s ease of use.

I’m using the free tier, and it looks like this:


Hosting graphs/ code

I’m using DeepNote as a Jupyter competitor, and most of my python scripts are being run on their virtual machines. They also let me embed all of the graphs (and code extracts if I’d like) into Notion. Again, also using the free tier.

Copywriting

I’m a big fan of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I’ll probably use it for proof-reading and rewriting. All posts which have had ChatGPT input will be marked accordingly.

SEO

simple.ink has a good interface to keep track of SEO for all pages:


I’m going to try using ChatGPT if it can write an SEO page description for me.


Not bad. It wrote a summary page for me and did some high level SEO descriptions. I don’t know enough to assess how good they are, but definitely a good first step.

Analytics

I’m using Google Analytics to track readership and growth over time. The integration of Google analytics with simple.ink is straight forward enough.