My history with WordPress.com

  • Began with free version, ca. 2007; was an improvement over Blogger (by then owned by Google).
  • Ads become too obtrusive, so paid to remove them.
  • Began using site not only to blog, but also as a professional signboard.
  • Eventually upgraded to business plan to meet customization needs (add plugins).
  • Made site usable for course materials (behind password) because setting up courses on Blackboard was crazy time-consuming, especially for an adjunct professor who couldn’t get into any routine. (And Blackboard was unreliable.)
    • Continued to use site for blog and professional signboard. Expensive, but support always available via chat. Well worth it, especially now that I had a regular salary (editor, GHI).
  • Switch to freelance in 2020 required a whole new set up. I accomplished this by modifying one of their templates.
  • Within about 18 months, this site broke. WordPress.com declared the theme I was using deprecated – with no warning.
  • Started over, but stayed on WordPress.com because of my elder care responsibilities (my father’s last several months alive).
  • WordPress.com all in on its block themed UI, so I did it that way. Took a lot of extra work, and a new issue arose: page load times.
    • Search engine rankings were now taking these into account, and these block themes seemed to be monsters. Extensions needed to optimize images, CSS, scripts.
    • Automattic’s Jetpack CDN was not all that fast. Needed to add Cloudflare to the mix for that and more control over caching.
  • Such a setup required constant attention, and WordPress.com’s online customer support degraded: longer wait times, maybe no chat at all, longer email response times, if such were needed, and so on. To add insult to injury, they started selling expensive website optimization add-ons for problems they themselves were creating.
  • Before I let the site renew, I looked for a system that produced static pages because they load faster than a dynamic platform like WordPress, which builds pages on the fly.

It would be possible to render static pages on my own computer with Hugo (or related) and then host these pages on Github or Cloudflare. Assuming modest traffic, this might even be free. But the learning curve. Hugo is powerful, but it’s command-line only. I didn’t have time before my other set-up had expired. Command line is doable for simpler tasks, but I’ve found that tools like these are generally written for others already at home in this environment. The documentation tends to have a high bar of entry.

Choosing Micro.blog

  • Micro.blog, which uses the Hugo engine, started to look attractive. Its web UI is quirky; its documentation is incomplete; and its Mac and iOS apps don’t offer feature parity. Its underlying ethos, however, works for me: It wants average users to be able to work with its tools. At the same time, it offers ways to customize things, even if these options tend to presuppose a lot more prior knowledge.
  • Micro.blog is definitely not as easy as Blogger and WordPress were in the aughts, if you need to customize things. Once you get things running, though, you can write in Markdown, which humans can easily write and read. It’s easy to post from any computer or mobile device, including my phone. (WordPress had made that increasingly difficult.)
  • Micro.blog has its own social network, which I was not interested in, especially not in the wake of Twitter’s murder and the ensuing platform fatigue (and I had come to Twitter after another platform imploded). But Micro.blog’s network and the blogs it hosts are built so one can participate in the IndieWeb. One can pull one’s content from elsewhere, syndicate the content of one’s hosted blog, and so on. Even some replies can travel beyond a single platform or website.
  • There has been a learning curve for me, but it has solved not only my blog-hosting problem, but also offered me additional options in this post-twitter world.
  • Given the Fediverse context (which decentralizes comment moderation and involves many more people in the process, in relative terms), I’ve even felt able to turn comments back on
  • And I’ve seen the point of bringing back a blogroll.
  • Bonus point: there hasn’t been any need to set up GDPR cookie notices, which were very necessary on WordPress.com (a self-hosted WordPress blog can be privacy friendlier, provided you have the know-how). I still need a privacy notice, but it’s much simpler now, especially since I also removed YouTube embeds.