Through the course of a couple of decades I've been online, I tried to run my blog multiple times, used different blogging engines from blogspot.com to self-hosted SSGs (Jekyll, Hugo, etc) and failed miserably in all attempts except two. For the last 7.5 years I published around 1000 small-to-medium-sized good-quality original posts, and this is a recap of what I learned from this journey and how I would do it in the future.
The further the publish button is, the harder it is to … publish. It's always tempting for me to tweak CSS, URL scheme, post layout, RSS/ActivityPub integrations, and that makes me further from writing and publishing. I've read this idea multiple times in other people's blogs and always thought that I'm beyond that and it wouldn't stop me from posting, but I was wrong.
My most productive blogging setup turned out to be a Telegram channel. It had subscribe functionality, basic markup, a number of views under the published post and a publish button - that's it. No analytics, no comments, no integrations, nothing. I could just write down the thought, maybe highlight a couple words with bold/italic and press the send button.
What? pro-FOSS person blogging on Telegram? Yes. Do I have reasons for it? Absolutely, and you can ask me about them. Do I recommend you to do so? No. Will I continue to blog on it? Probably no. The most important thing that you can take from it is that: to become consistent in blogging I needed a good enough publish button and a place, where people can sanely read what I've published.
Feedback is important; comments are overrated. I could get far on my initial motivation, but if I didn't see people read my stuff I would stop writing before I make a writing habit. Thus seeing the growing number of views is already huge, and getting questions, constructive critique and kind words is enormous.
Fun fact: I don't need the comments functionality for it. People can discuss my posts in other corners of the internet (and sometimes I'm not even aware of those discussions, which is totally ok). People find the way to contact me directly or send the feedback to my inbox. Moreover, implementing a good comment system in the blog is really hard.
It's easier to write regularly. When I skip writing a post for a couple of weeks, it's hard to come back to writing the next one, however, when I publish consistently I always get more ideas than I can write down.
Better good enough than nothing. We can learn and grow only when we have enough practice, and it's inevitable that we make imperfect things during it. So I came up with a throw-away mindset: start writing a text that you will discard, then improve this text until it becomes good enough. Publish it, profit! I apply a similar principle for tasks and projects, which feels hard and daunting and it usually produces impressively good results.
As you can tell, I already spent some time over-engineering the blog setup, but this time I stopped at a good enough state: I have a decent CSS, RSS/Atom feed, minimal analytics and a publish "button" nearby. In addition to that, I have a writing habit and skills under my belt and better understanding of what is essential and what is secondary. And of course the most important thing: I published this post.