I’ve been playing around with other blogging platforms for a while now… Ghost, Hugo, Django, and others. Is WordPress what I continue to use? Something else? I wish this wasn’t such a struggle, but I’m keenly aware of what drives this indecision.
1. Nostalgia
I am, first and foremost, driven by a nostalgia for a time I remember more than participated in, where websites were closer to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/, devoid of most types of styling and thus:
- uncomplicated
- fast
- easily understood (from a technical perspective)
- and thus… hackable.
It’s not particularly mysterious why these things appeal. However, they’re simultaneously conflicting with the following.
2. Design
I’m a sucker for good design. You’ll note that this is mostly in direct opposition to the simple, text-based, monospaced font aesthetic in #1. Yes, I have a couple advanced degrees in art. Yes, I’ve worked in marketing and design for a number of years. Yes, I care about how things look and my eyes are drawn toward minimalistic, but chic, so-called content.
*le sigh*
3. Fun
I actually find it great fun to play around with other platforms and I find myself doing this frequently. It’s honestly one of the reasons I ended up finally getting a domain and a shared hosting server. I like messing about with things to learn new things.
A selection of some of the many site platforms I’ve setup and used to write on in the interest of good-old-fashioned curiosity and general interest.
New WordPress
And so, wordpress just updated it’s blogging platform and this somewhat older site got upgraded is well. It’s substantially more pleasant to write in than the previous iteration―but it lacks the simplicity of something like Hugo (especially if I were to set it up to use emacs’ org-mode as the base as I’ve been planning). We’re not there yet.
For the moment I’m going to ignore this inner conflict about what to use as a platform. Perhaps that will allow me to focus on the projects themselves. At any rate, if you’re interested in checking out what I’ve written at those other projects do click the images above to visit wholly different pages.