This whole WordPress v. WP Engine nonsense is driving me up the goddamn wall. I don’t like seeing it. I don’t like reading about it. I’ve been using WP for going on – oh, I don’t know – almost 20 years or so? I liked it because it was open source and built by people who cared about it, and it was a little more robust then Graymatter, which was the blogging system I was using at the time. (Except for LiveJournal, but LJ was essentially my Facebook/Twitter in the early aughts.)
Now I wanna ditch it. I even redid this site just this past weekend and seeing all the bullshit that Matt is pulling has my gut in a knot and wanting to see if I can find a nice, simple blogging platform/CMS that is easy to get started with, and has options for customization and self-hosting. I tried ClassicPress this weekend but the themes leave something to be desired.
I know someone is going to tell me “oh just build it yourself in Hugo/Jekyll/Eleventy” which is great, and something I eventually want to do, but the learning curve is steep and I ain’t up to doing all that.
I should take a peek at micro.blog or maybe Bear, a lot of Indieweb and Masto people are saying they like those services but I really want to keep my own site and not post on someone else’s platform. But maybe that’s what I should do right now. (It could also save me money on hosting fees.)
Ghost is an option – and one I can easily install on my managed hosting plan that I have for this – but ehhhhhhhhh with school and everything, do I really have the time to build something from scratch? No. The answer to that is no.
All I know is that I don’t like the shit Matt is pulling. I don’t like the things I’m reading about him and how he does things. But is it really worth completely upending my site over?
Maybe it really IS time to move on.
I’ve been on a similar journey lately. Up till just a couple years ago I’d been using WordPress but started feeling a bit frustrated with the constraints of the system along with unease with the underlying complexity. Thousands of files, hundreds of folders.
I moved to Micro.blog which felt simpler in terms of composition. I generally like the philosophy and ethics of the owner Manton who works hard to be a good citizen of the web and the Indy web. I love many aspects of the service and have recommended it but recently decided to move again. I’m not someone who likes to move without good reason. Too much hassle. It’s not something I just do because I’m curious or want something new.
My reasons for the current, in-progress move was that I realized that with micro.blog I was still stuck in a complex template/theme system that seemed like a hassle to modify and which, even when modified, was too limited. I come from the old web and have been hand coding html/css since the late 90s. Also, it occurred to me that micro.blog, along with all the other current Indy blog hosts like Bear, Blot, etc, they’re all sole proprietor businesses dependent on the one person. That makes me a bit uncomfortable.
My solution? Yeah, it’s going to sound crazy and it’s been a lot of work. But it’s work I have been enjoying. I’ve returned to building from scratch. No application building the site though I did try a couple and I did play with Eleventy for a day. I ultimately decided that those left me dependent in a way I wanted to get away from. It’s been a couple weeks and I’ve got the framework of the site up and have just been gradually moving my archives over. Yep, one by one. No hurry, I have as much time as I need and am making it a point to revisit and enjoy the old stuff as a kind of personal visit with my blogging. Kinda nice actually.
And I’ve created a posting process for making new posts that is fairly easy. No doubt it’s not for everyone and may not be for you. I decided that I wanted to really take the time to enjoy webbing in a way that I haven’t in a long time and it’s been great.
Good luck with your site. I’ve just recently discovered your site and subbed via RSS. Looking forward to seeing what you do with it.
You should check out TiddlyWiki. I looked into all the options out there and settled with TiddlyWiki due to the simplicity and powerful customization through addons. You can either use a single-file setup which basically saves everything in a single HTML file, or you can run the Node.js version that saves posts in separate files, with the option to also save as a single file.