Madhurima Mindscape

🤔 1. First Decide Why You Need a Personal Blog

Before thinking about website design, themes, fonts, or technical implementation, I would suggest answering one simple question: Why do you want a personal blog?

A personal blog can serve many purposes. You might want to write about your professional journey, share technical knowledge, document your hobbies, publish poetry, discuss books, or simply express your thoughts.

However, not every kind of content requires a separate website. There are already several platforms where you can publish your work without having to build and maintain an entire website.

For example, if you primarily want to share photographs, everyday moments, and small updates about your life, Instagram might already serve that purpose quite well. You can share pictures, stories, and other visual content without worrying about maintaining a website.

Similarly, if your content is mainly professional, technical, or related to your career, platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium might be more suitable.

So, before creating a personal blog, think about whether you genuinely need one or whether an existing platform can already do what you want.

💼 2. Explore Existing Platforms Before Building Your Own

One of the advantages of using an existing platform is that you do not have to build everything yourself. You can focus directly on writing and sharing your content instead of spending time managing a website.

Two platforms that I think are particularly useful for different kinds of writing are LinkedIn and Medium.

🔹 LinkedIn for Professional and Technical Content

LinkedIn is primarily a professional platform. If you want to write about your projects, technical work, professional experiences, industry observations, or lessons learned while working on something, LinkedIn can be a very good choice.

You can also share opinions and insights related to your professional interests. The important thing is to understand the kind of profile you want to build and publish content that fits naturally with that direction.

For longer pieces, you can also explore LinkedIn articles. Another advantage is that features such as comments and reactions are already available. You do not have to build your own commenting system or worry about implementing these features.

If your main objective is to share your projects, professional journey, or technical knowledge, LinkedIn might be sufficient without requiring a separate personal blog.

📝 Medium for Longer Articles and Technical Insights

Medium is another useful platform, particularly if you enjoy writing longer articles.

Suppose you have developed a technical solution, explored a particular technology, learned something interesting, or want to explain a concept in detail. You can write about it on Medium without having to create and maintain your own blogging system.

One major advantage of platforms like Medium is that they already have an established audience. You can publish your content and potentially reach readers who are already interested in similar topics.

You also do not have to spend time developing the entire publishing interface, managing comments, or implementing other standard blogging features.

If you have something specific to write about but do not want the responsibility of maintaining a separate website, an existing platform can be a practical option.

💡 My tip: Choose an existing platform if it already serves your purpose. You do not need to build a separate website just because you want to publish articles.

💜 3. Understand When You Actually Need a Personal Blog

So, if platforms like LinkedIn and Medium already exist, when does it make sense to create a personal blog?

I think a personal blog becomes particularly useful when you want to share things that do not necessarily belong to a specific professional or technical category.

Maybe you love reading books, writing poetry, listening to music, painting, travelling, or exploring completely different hobbies. Perhaps you have personal reflections, interesting observations, or experiences that you want to turn into articles.

You might also want to maintain project diaries, where you explain the story behind a project, the decisions you made, the challenges you faced, and what you learned while building it.

These are the kinds of things that might not fit naturally into a professional profile or a platform dedicated primarily to technical articles.

A personal blog gives you the freedom to bring different interests together. You can write about literature in one article, a technical experiment in another, and a travel experience in the next.

However, there is another important consideration. Managing a personal blog requires time and effort. You have to maintain the website, organize the content, manage the design, and occasionally deal with technical issues.

If you only intend to publish two or three articles and do not plan to continue, maintaining an entire website might not be worth the additional effort. In that case, an existing platform could be a much simpler solution.

But if you have genuine interests, ideas, and experiences that you want to keep writing about over a longer period, a personal blog can be a wonderful project.

💡 My tip: Do not start a personal blog simply because having a website sounds exciting. Start one when you have a genuine reason to maintain it.

📝 4. Decide What Kind of Content You Want to Publish

Once you have decided that you genuinely want a personal blog, the next step is figuring out what kind of content belongs there.

You do not necessarily need to restrict yourself to one subject. A personal blog can contain different categories depending on your interests.

For example, you might want to write about:

• Hobbies: Your favourite activities, interests, and things you enjoy doing.
• Projects: Your experiments, development work, project diaries, and lessons learned.
• Books and Literature: Books you love, poetry, reviews, and literary observations.
• Technology: Technical insights, tools, programming, and new technologies.
• Travel: Places you visit, experiences, photographs, and stories.
• Personal Reflections: Opinions, life lessons, observations, and random thoughts.
• Creative Work: Photography, music, painting, writing, and other creative interests.

You can also have a combination of personal and technical content. There is no requirement to maintain a single theme if your interests are naturally varied.

The important thing is to understand what you want your website to represent. Once you have a rough idea of the content, it becomes easier to make decisions about the design and structure.

🎨 5. Choose a Design That Matches Your Content

After deciding what you want to publish, you can start thinking about the overall appearance of your website.

I think the design should complement the kind of content you publish. A website focused mainly on technical articles might have a very different appearance from one that focuses on travel, photography, literature, or personal hobbies.

💻 A Technology-Inspired Theme

If your website mainly contains technical content with a little personal writing, a technology-inspired design can work really well.

You could use illustrations of laptops, computers, coding environments, or other technology-related elements. Fonts such as monospace can also give certain parts of the website a technical appearance.

A clean layout with subtle colours, modern typography, and a few technology-inspired illustrations can create a nice balance between professional and personal.

🌿 A Nature-Inspired or Hobby-Oriented Theme

On the other hand, if your website focuses more on personal interests, travel, photography, or creative hobbies, you can experiment with a completely different design.

For example, if you love nature and photography, you might choose a nature-inspired background, calming colours, and typography that feels comfortable to read.

A green colour palette, subtle illustrations, and carefully selected photographs can make the website feel warm and welcoming.

You can also take inspiration from your favourite hobbies and interests. The design does not have to follow a standard blogging template.

The idea is to create an appearance that feels connected to the content and the person behind the website.

⚙️ 6. Choose Your Blogging Platform Carefully

Choosing a blogging platform is one of the most important decisions you will make before starting your website.

I would strongly recommend exploring the available options before committing to one. It is much easier to make this decision at the beginning than to publish several articles and then realise that you want to migrate to another platform.

Website migration can become quite frustrating, especially for a personal project. You might have to restructure your content, update URLs, recreate layouts, move images, adjust templates, and fix broken links.

Sometimes the migration work becomes so exhausting that you start wondering whether maintaining the website is worth the effort at all.

So, spend some time understanding the available platforms and choose something that matches your requirements.

💻 Why I Prefer Jekyll

Personally, I feel Jekyll is a great option for personal blogs.

One reason is that it provides several useful built-in features, including layouts, components, Liquid tags, and includes. These features make it possible to organize a website into reusable sections instead of writing everything from scratch.

Another reason is the learning experience. Building a personal blog is not only about creating a website to show other people. It can also be a project through which you learn new technologies and improve your development skills.

With Jekyll, you get an opportunity to understand static site generation, Liquid templating, layouts, includes, front matter, and other concepts while working on something you genuinely want to build.

Even if you do not publish articles regularly, the website itself can remain a useful learning project.

I personally built my blog using Jekyll, and I absolutely love it. I have also written a separate article about Jekyll migration. I am planning to write more about useful Jekyll development tips as well, because there are certain errors, linking issues, and other concepts that initially look complicated but are actually quite simple once you understand them.

Of course, Jekyll is not the only option. The best platform depends on your technical preferences, available time, and the kind of website you want to maintain.

💡 My tip: Do not choose a platform only because it is popular. Choose one that you can comfortably maintain over a longer period.

👑 7. Always Prioritise Content Over Design

Now comes one of the most important parts of building a personal blog: the content.

Content is king. Always focus on the quality of your content before spending too much time improving the appearance of your website.

I personally spent a lot of time designing my blog. I worked on things like drop caps, themes, fonts, layouts, and other visual details. These things definitely improve the overall reading experience.

But they are not the reason someone will continue visiting your website.

If you want readers to stay on your blog, the content itself needs to be interesting, meaningful, and worth reading.

A beautiful website can encourage someone to explore an article, but good content is what makes the experience worthwhile.

There are a few things I think are particularly important when writing personal blog articles.

✍️ Share Personal Experiences, Not Just Personal Incidents

There is a small distinction between sharing a personal incident and sharing a personal experience.

A personal incident describes something that actually happened to you. A personal experience goes a little further. It includes what you understood from that incident, what you learned, and how you look at it in retrospect.

Both can be interesting, and there is nothing wrong with sharing personal incidents if you are comfortable doing so. However, I personally feel that sharing experiences and reflections can be more meaningful for a blog.

For example, suppose you made a silly mistake while working on a project. You do not necessarily have to describe every detail of the incident. You can briefly explain what happened and then focus on what you learned from it.

I recently had a small issue while working on my website. I had a JavaScript file, but there was a typo in the filename used while linking it in the blog.

I spent around fifteen minutes wondering why the file was not working. I kept checking the code and trying to fix the problem, without realising that the file had not been linked correctly in the first place.

If I were writing a technical article, I would explain the filename issue, the incorrect reference, and how to fix it. But if I were writing about the personal lesson behind the incident, I would focus more on what the experience taught me.

Sometimes, when something goes wrong, we become so focused on fixing the problem that we forget to step back and examine the basics.

The lesson for me was simple: stay calm, understand the problem, and look for the solution instead of repeatedly reacting to the same issue.

You can apply this approach to almost any personal experience. You do not have to share every detail of what happened. A little background followed by your understanding of the situation can be enough to create an interesting article.

💬 Be Honest About Your Opinions

Another important thing is honesty.

If you cannot express your genuine opinions about the subjects you write about, a personal blog can lose much of its purpose.

You should be able to discuss things you believe in, share your observations, and express your perspective. This does not mean that you have to write controversial opinions or share every thought that comes to your mind.

You can absolutely be a private person and still maintain a meaningful personal blog. You do not have to reveal everything about your life.

As I mentioned earlier, focusing on your experiences, reflections, and lessons can be a good way to write personally without sharing unnecessary private details.

📚 Create Templates for Different Categories

One more thing that can make writing easier is creating templates for different kinds of articles.

For example, if you write poetry, you can have one layout for poetry-related posts. Technical articles can have a different structure, while travel diaries and personal reflections can follow their own formats.

Templates help you maintain consistency without having to think about the entire structure every time you start writing.

You can decide what sections are useful for each category and reuse the structure whenever you publish a new article.

🎙️ 8. Use Voice Typing If You Find Writing Difficult

Here is another practical suggestion. If you find typing tiring or simply prefer speaking instead of typing, you can use voice typing to get your initial ideas onto the page.

A lot of people have interesting things to say but struggle with the process of sitting down and typing everything. Voice typing can make that process considerably easier.

You can open a messaging application such as WhatsApp, use its voice typing feature, and speak about everything you want to include in your article. You can also use the built-in dictation feature on your device or another speech-to-text tool.

Do not worry too much about sentence structure, punctuation, or formatting during the first attempt. Focus on expressing your ideas naturally.

Once you have the initial draft, you can organize the paragraphs, correct the sentences, add headings, and improve the overall flow.

If you need additional help, you can use writing and grammar tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly to improve the wording, check grammar, and organize the content.

However, there is one thing I consider extremely important: the central idea should always be yours.

Tools can help with formatting, grammar, sentence structure, and clarity. But the original thoughts, opinions, and experiences should come from you.

The moment an article becomes entirely generated ideas that you do not genuinely relate to, it starts losing the personal value that makes a personal blog special.

For this particular article, the ideas come from things I have personally thought about, experienced, and wanted to share. That is the kind of originality I would like to preserve in my writing.

💡 My tip: Use tools to improve how you express your ideas, not to replace the ideas themselves.

🌐 9. Share Your Blog After Publishing It

Once your blog is ready and you have published some content, you can start sharing it with other people.

You can share your articles on social media, add your website to your professional profiles, or simply send the link to people who might find your writing interesting.

You can also choose how accessible you want your website to be. For example, you might want to make the entire website publicly available, keep certain pages unlisted, or explore a private setup depending on your requirements.

Another possibility is to make your blog open source. You can publish its source code on GitHub so that other people can explore how you built it, learn from it, or suggest improvements.

You can also choose to deploy your website using a hosting service that suits your needs.

There is no single correct approach. Decide how much you want to share and choose the publishing method that feels comfortable to you.

📱 10. Pay Attention to the User Experience

One of the most important parts of maintaining a blog is making sure that visitors can comfortably read and navigate your website.

You might have written a wonderful article, but if the page does not render properly or the navigation is confusing, readers may struggle to enjoy the content.

Always check how your website looks on different screen sizes, especially mobile phones. Make sure that text is readable, images fit properly, and important elements do not take up unnecessary space.

Another useful feature is providing an easy way to navigate back to the top of a long article.

If you publish longer articles, readers should not have to scroll endlessly just to return to the beginning of the page.

You should also pay attention to headers and navigation elements. For example, I previously had a fixed header on mobile devices. It occupied a considerable amount of screen space while reading.

I eventually changed that behaviour so that the header no longer remained fixed in the same way. This made more space available for the actual content.

These might seem like small design decisions, but they can make a noticeable difference to the reading experience.

• Make sure the website works properly on mobile devices.
• Use comfortable font sizes and readable line spacing.
• Keep navigation simple and easy to understand.
• Provide a convenient way to return to the top of long articles.
• Make sure images resize properly on smaller screens.
• Avoid headers and other elements that unnecessarily occupy screen space.
• Check that links, buttons, and other interactive elements work correctly.

Finally, use your own website regularly. Try reading your articles as if you were a visitor who has never seen the website before.

You can also ask friends or other people to review your blog if you feel comfortable. Ask them to read an article and share their experience. Sometimes another person notices navigation problems or design issues that you might have overlooked.

💡 My tip: Do not only test whether your website works. Test whether it is comfortable to use.

✍️ 11. Let Your Titles Create Curiosity

Now that we have discussed the purpose, platform, content, and user experience, I want to share a few more personal ideas about how a blog can feel unique.

For my blog, I wanted to keep titles short, ideally no more than two or three words. I did not want every title to explain the entire article before someone had even opened it.

When a title is too descriptive, the reader may already feel that they know what the article is going to say. Some of the curiosity disappears.

Imagine coming across a title like Practical Wisdom or Data Stories. You might pause and wonder: What does that mean? What is the story behind it? That small moment of curiosity can make someone want to read further.

I think of it a little like the titles of poems. A poem can have a short, unusual title that captures its feeling without explaining every line. The title gives you a doorway into the piece, rather than a summary of everything inside it.

That is why I prefer short titles on the home page. For readers who want more context, a separate blog-exploration page can show the longer title, a description, and other details.

In that way, the home page stays simple and inviting, while the detailed page gives readers more information when they want it.

Of course, descriptive titles are perfectly fine too. The important thing is to choose a style that feels right for your own website.

💡 My tip: Experiment with titles. They can be poetic, mysterious, descriptive, funny, or anything else that feels natural to you.

🌸 12. Make the Loader Feel Like You

A loading screen is often treated as a tiny technical detail, but it can also be a lovely opportunity to introduce your personality.

Instead of using a generic spinner, imagine a loader built around things you genuinely like.

It could include:

• Your favourite animal, such as a cat or a dog.
• Your favourite flower, perhaps a rose or a lily.
• An icon connected to your favourite technology.
• A small symbol representing a hobby you enjoy.
• A photograph or illustration that feels meaningful to you.
• A personal avatar, if you are comfortable sharing one.

These elements could appear one by one, form a small animation, or become part of a simple illustrated scene.

It does not need to be complicated. Even one thoughtful detail can make the experience feel more welcoming and recognisably yours.

And remember, you do not have to use a real photograph or personal image. An illustration, initials, an abstract avatar, or a favourite icon can work just as well.

📸 13. Keep Travel Diaries

If you enjoy travelling, taking photographs, exploring new places, or simply collecting memorable experiences, a personal blog can be a wonderful home for your travel diaries.

A travel post does not have to be a formal travel guide. It can be a story about one day, one place, or one unexpected moment.

Maybe you reached the top of a mountain after a long journey. Perhaps you took a cab whose driver spoke a different language, and everyone tried to communicate until someone opened Google Translate.

Maybe the funniest part of the trip was not the destination at all, but the little adventure it took to get there.

Those are the details that make travel stories memorable. You can write about what happened, what surprised you, what went wrong, what made you laugh, and what you learned along the way.

Photographs can make these entries even more vivid, especially if you love taking pictures. You could add a gallery, a few selected images, or a single photograph with its story.

But pictures are completely optional. You can write a beautiful travel diary without sharing any photographs, and you should only post images that you are comfortable making public.

I would love to have a travel-diary section on my own blog. It feels like a nice way to preserve experiences and revisit the stories behind them, not just where I went, but what it felt like to be there.

🚧 14. Give Unfinished Things a Place

Not every project reaches completion. Sometimes you start building something and run out of time. Sometimes an idea that once excited you becomes difficult to continue.

You might have an old project, a creative experiment, or something you cared about deeply but could not finish for one reason or another.

Usually, we only share the finished version of our work. But unfinished projects can have stories worth telling too.

You could create a section for abandoned or unfinished projects and write about:

• What the original idea was.
• Why you were excited to begin it.
• What you managed to create or learn.
• What made you pause or leave it unfinished.
• What you might do differently if you returned to it.

This does not have to be a collection of failures. It can be an honest record of curiosity, experimentation, changing priorities, and learning.

Sometimes an unfinished project explains your journey just as well as a completed one.

🏷️ 15. Organise Posts with Categories and Tags

As a blog grows, it becomes useful to give posts a little structure. Categories and tags help readers discover related content without having to search through every article.

For example, a personal blog might have categories such as:

• Travel Diaries: Journeys, places, photographs, and travel stories.
• Personal Reflections: Thoughts, experiences, and lessons.
• Creative Projects: Things you are making, exploring, or experimenting with.
• Technology: Tools, development, and technical discoveries.
• Unfinished Projects: Ideas and projects that are still in progress or have been set aside.
• Books and Literature: Books, poetry, reviews, and literary observations.

Tags can add more specific details. A travel post, for instance, might use tags such as mountains, photography, or the name of a place.

A project post might use tags related to the tools, technologies, or ideas involved.

The goal is not to create as many categories as possible. Start with a small structure that makes sense for the content you actually publish. You can always refine it as your blog evolves.

🔐 16. Create a Little Secret Page

Here is another playful idea: a secret page.

It could be a page that is not advertised in your navigation menu or linked from the usual places on your website.

Instead, you could share its permanent URL only with people who discover it or receive the link from you.

The page could contain little facts about you, favourite things, hobbies, a collection of small recommendations, a personal playlist, a note to visitors, or something completely unexpected.

You could even make it an evolving page and add a new detail whenever you feel like it.

There is no need to put anything private or sensitive there. A secret page is not automatically a secure or password-protected page. Anyone who has the URL may be able to open it, and it could potentially be discovered or shared.

Think of it as an unlisted little corner of your website, not a place for confidential information.

I like the idea because it gives curious visitors something extra to discover. It can be a small surprise that makes exploring your website feel more personal.

💜 17. Make the Website Reflect Your Own Ideas

All of these ideas come down to one thing: a personal blog should feel like it belongs to the person who created it.

You might prefer poetic one- or two-word titles, while someone else may want detailed descriptive headings. You might want a playful loader, while another person may prefer a clean and minimal one.

Perhaps you love documenting trips, or maybe your favourite thing to write about is a project that never quite reached the finish line.

There is no single correct way to build a personal blog. Take inspiration from other websites, but do not feel that you have to copy their choices.

Keep the ideas that feel meaningful to you, change the ones that do not, and make room for ideas that are entirely your own.

You can have a beautiful descriptive title if you want. You can have a short, mysterious title if that is more your style. Both are completely fine.

The important thing is that the idea comes from you.