Hello there, I hope you are doing well!

This is the first article in the Genics log series where we will be documenting our monthly progress on the blog and report what’s been brewing up in the past months.

Before diving into the latest news at Genics, I would like to introduce myself. I am Gourav Khunger, the founder of Genics Blog. I am a teenager from India who is passionate about software development and open source.

Let’s get started!

Introduction

Genics Blog went open-source at this New Year, which means we started accepting community contributions for the blog.

Within a month itself, we have reached huge milestones! Here’s a gist of some stats from the past month:

• The Core team members increased from 1 to 5 members!
• A total of 15 articles were posted in January!
• A total of 40 members joined the Genics Blog discord server!
• Rose from 200 monthly visitors to 500+!

How it all started

I always wanted to create a community of skilled developers who create quality content around topics!

As the new year began, I grabbed the opportunity to open source my existing blog and build a community around the existing content.

And since we chose the open source way, we quickly rose from 200 visitors/month to 500+ visitors/month!

Open Source Setup

We use GitHub for our open source projects. Everything we build around Genics is open source because we want to be as transparent as we can!

For this blog, we used Jekyll to generate the website and render all the content. The beauty of Jekyll is we can use any design template, while writing the articles in markdown format. It renders the complete site with an easy build command!

GitHub Pages works really well for hosting the website, because jekyll generates static html pages which work seamlessly with GitHub Pages.

There’s a lot more to share on how the site and management works. I’d love to write articles on how we build and operate our systems completely for FREE, so keep an eye out on the developer documentation and future posts on Genics blog!

Announcing BeyondWords.io Sponsorship

Just a few days ago we got sponsored by BeyondWords.io!

BeyondWords is an AI voice and audio publishing platform that brings frictionless audio to writers, newsrooms, and businesses!

It is a platform that allows anyone to publish their written scripts in audio format to the world. In my opinion, the best part about is its text to speech AI conversion modules are far better than those of Google and Amazon as the audio it generates seems to be near human voice!

Genics Blog got sponsored by BeyondWords where they generously offered us free services to convert our articles to audio formats! You can try out the audio functionality right at the top of this post!

Stats

We have grown manifolds just because of the fact that we went open source!

Open Source

Here are the stats for the repositories under Genics Blog organization:

• genicsblog.com (Main repo with posts and data files): 21 stars, 14 forks
• theme-files (Basically template files): 2 stars, 1 fork
• docs (Documentation website): 3 stars, 2 forks
• genics-bot (Bot for the Discord server): 5 star, 1 fork

Google Analytics

Images speak louder than words!

Organic Stats

Future Plans

We are looking forward to producing a lot of quality content in the future, as well as working on improving the platform.

Here are a few examples of some things we’d work on in the near future:

• Building certain tools to aid the writing process for authors at Genics Blog.
• Adding table of content to the posts.
• Social previews for anchor tags in posts.
• Copy buttons for code blocks.
• Adding some cool webmention functionality to our articles, so as to highlight who shares our articles.

And a lot more!

You can check out the issues page on theme-files repo to see what’s on the roadmap.

Final Words

I’m really glad to be sharing this info with you!

Did you know we have a discord bot that sends notifications on our analytics and stats everyday 👀. I bet you, hardly anyone would do that :P

Do join us there to get notified of new posts and updates on Genics Blog.

If you find what we are doing as high school students fascinating, consider joining us and be a part of Genics Blog! Here are the ways you could contribute to it.

Looking forward to seeing you engage with the active community on our Discord server :)