Simply Blogging

Brandon has some thoughts on blogging platforms and simplicity. I wrote the following as a comment on his post, and I’ve decided to post it here as well.

I keep coming back to WordPress. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough that I can live with it. For me, the Gutenberg editor has been a revelation, as has the evolution of full-site editing. With those tools, I can do 90% of the customisation I want for my personal site. At some point, I will probably either build a child theme or a separate bare-bones theme for playing around with options and further customisation under the hood.

I can see the appeal of services like Blot, Bear, Micro.blog and Write.as – by focusing on the basics they reduce the friction when it comes to (re)starting blogging.

I’ve looked at the various static site generators, and they make my head spin, which is quite something since I’m a techie. While I like Markdown for writing, I’m not someone who lives on the command line. And deploying such sites means travelling to a parallel universe where traditional web hosting doesn’t exist. Great for developers and techies, but it’s overkill for the rest of us.

At the end of the day, I’d rather play a fixed amount annually for hosting, spend a few minutes every day or so checking on and managing my WordPress installation, and write online as I’ve always done. 🤷

Obviously, what works for me may not work for you. But I’ve reached a point in life where I’m no longer seeking greener grass. Instead, I’m looking at what I currently have and seeing what I need to change to help it grow and support me.