Category: Uncategorized

After reading Elizabeth Tai’s excellent post on IndieWeb blogging, I was inspired to start my own. I wanted a place to write up my thoughts and feelings. I don’t really care about making money or marketing myself. Seeing what other real-life bloggers do, I was content to make a variety blog, where I can write about whatever interests me.

While I am a professional Software Developer, I don’t want my blog to be a place where I am continually hacking on the layouts and designs (I do enough of that at my day job!). The key is to focus on writing and get everything else out of the way.

I’d like to walk through some of the key decisions I’ve made.

Blogging Software

I danced around this for quite a while. I originally planned on using a static site generator like Hugo. Unfortunately, this lead to a massive amount of setup and maintenance time. My next thought was to use a platform, like Medium or Tumblr, but they turned out to be too restrictive.

I decided to build a list of key desirable qualities to ease my search:

• Super-simple setup and maintenance. I want to focus on writing and not technology.
• High-level of adoption. I don’t want to invest in a technology that is going away or not kept up-to-date.
• IndieWeb compatible. I want to adopt a POSSE philosophy, where I keep this blog as my source-of-truth but allow users to consume in whatever way they are comfortable.
• Commenting system that allows readers to comment without sign-up but is spam resilient.

Quite quickly, it became apparent that WordPress was really my only option.

Theme

Now that I had honed down on WordPress, I needed so select my theme.

I built a list of key qualities:

• Consistently kept up-to-date. I don’t want to have to deal with incompatibilities between the latest WordPress version not working with my theme.
• Supports nested menus. I really like the idea of building a nested tree structure for my writing. Not sure if I will use this but I want to have the option.
• Something I find visually appealing.
• Completely free. I’d like to keep maintenance costs to a minimum.

Once I figured out what I wanted, I started delving into possibilities. There are a lot of incredible and beautiful free themes. However, very few of these have actually receive consistent updates. We often see this with freely available software is that it is abandoned due to lack of incentive to maintain. This left me between having to pay for a theme or use a WordPress official theme.

Luckily for me, the WordPress official themes are great! I ended up going with Twenty Twenty-One, as it was what I preferred aesthetically and it supported nested menus out-of-the-box.

Hosting

Now, that I’ve drilled down on using WordPress, I had to figure out where to host the darn thing. If you haven’t figured it out already, I love bullet-point lists.

• Hosted WordPress, not a hosted WordPress instance. I want automatic security updates and to never have to worry about it. I’m fine with giving up some control to make my life easier. I also don’t want to admin my instance, I just want to get all obstacles out of my way.
• Affordable – I really want something that costs ~$10/month or less. So cheap that I don’t even notice the auto-debit.
• Automated backups – I don’t want to stress about losing everything. I want something fire and forget with backups, that I will only look at if I’m in a pickle.

After many hours of delving into blog posts, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads, I ended up on WordPress.com. To be fair, there was a lot of hate for wp.com. However, I didn’t really like any of the other alternatives. I am still not completely sure that it is the best option for my needs but I am completely confident that it will suit my needs. I will have to pay for a backup plugin which I can get for ~$5/month or less.

Finally a website!

Now here I am. Finally got this all put together. Once I had all the decisions made, the sign-up and creation took less than 30 minutes. I’m sure I’ll do some tweaking as I go, but for now, this seems perfect!