Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch

Appendix A. Creating a Blog

In Chapter 2, we suggested that you might want to try blogging as a way to help digest the information you’re reading and practicing. But what if you don’t have a blog already? Which platform should you use?

Unfortunately, when it comes to blogging, it seems like you have to make a difficult decision: either use a platform that makes it easy but subjects you and your readers to advertisements, paywalls, and fees, or spend hours setting up your own hosting service and weeks learning about all kinds of intricate details. Perhaps the biggest benefit to the “do-it-yourself” approach is that you really own your own posts, rather than being at the whim of a service provider and their decisions about how to monetize your content in the future.

It turns out, however, that you can have the best of both worlds!

Blogging with GitHub Pages

A great solution is to host your blog on a platform called GitHub Pages, which is free, has no ads or paywall, and makes your data available in a standard way such that you can at any time move your blog to another host. But all the approaches we’ve seen to using GitHub Pages have required knowledge of the command line and arcane tools that only software developers are likely to be familiar with. For instance, GitHub’s own documentation on setting up a blog includes a long list of instructions that involve installing the Ruby programming language, using the git command-line tool, copying over version numbers, and more—17 steps ...