So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish — Again!

Nearly a year ago, I migrated this blog over to Micro.blog.

And now I’m back on WordPress again.

Why? That’s a good question. Several factors are involved in my decision.

The primary one is financial — while Micro.blog’s paid plans are very reasonable, the blunt reality is that it all adds up over a year, and the recent financial turbulence here in the UK has reminded me of the downside of paying for services in US Dollars, namely that those costs can fluctuate a lot.

(Yes, I’m paying for hosting for my WordPress blog, but a) that’s currently payed up until early next year, b) the cost over the next three years is considerably less than what I’d spend to host with Micro.blog.)

Given that the economic outlook right now is Cloudy With a Chance of Recession, I’ve had to take a long hard look at where I’m spending my money.

The other factor is personal and perhaps a sign of my getting older. While I can see the advantages of using a static site generator like Hugo, the major disadvantage (for me) is that it requires a lot of fiddling with various files to get it doing what I want. I’d initially thought that moving to Micro.blog would make it easier for me to make my blog look and function how I wanted it, but I can honestly say that my tolerance for Reading The Friendly Primarily-Online Manual Documentation has dropped dramatically, particularly if said Documentation isn’t perhaps the greatest.

(This is not a knock against the Hugo team, or any of the frankly heroic folks who’ve learnt how to make Micro.blog do their bidding — more power to you all. It’s a reflection on me, and the fact that I get frustrated easily these days.)

On the flipside, while WordPress the self-hosted app is an imperfect beast, it has the distinction of being a Known Quantity that I can get up and running quickly and knock into shape without breaking a sweat. And the plugin ecosystem around it means that I can get a lot more done before reaching the point where I may need to break out some PHP custom code. While others have recoiled from the Gutenberg editor, I have no problem with it whatsoever, quite the opposite.

(Another aside: yes, I’m primarily entering posts in Gutenberg. And some of you are doubtless shuddering at that idea. Here’s the plot twist, though: I can paste in my lovingly crafted Markdown text and Gutenberg automagically converts it for me. That’s a win-win for me.)

I’ve actually had this blog running locally on my Mac using MAMP Pro for a few weeks now, while I cleaned up the archives and fixed a lot of formatting errors caused by successive migrations. Once I was happy with that, I used the Duplicator plugin to help pack up all the data to transfer to a fresh WordPress installation on my web hosting account.

There’s a bit more work to do on the site — extra pages to add, plugins to install and setup, and site customisations including comment-by-email links and perhaps integrating with the Fediverse — but overall I’m very happy with how smoothly this has gone, and much happier with the admin side of things.

I want to stress that my taking my blog off of Micro.blog is not out of any dissatisfaction with how Manton, Jean and the rest of the team there run things. Quite the contrary, they have build an amazing service and a wonderful community, many of whom I continue to follow. My decision, as I’ve outlined above, is purely practical with regard to the time, energy and particular money I have available nowadays.

It gladdens my heart that Micro.blog and other blogging services exist and provide so many ways for people to express themselves online without being stuck inside a social media silo and subject to the whims of companies whose primary goal is to keep you in their walled garden.