11 ms·

Where to Blog

73 points by avthar 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago
I think there's a lot of analysis paralysis on deciding where to blog, so I threw together a quick repo you can just clone, drop some Markdown files in and it'll auto-publish to Gitlab pages and Neocities whenever you push: https://quicksite.stavros.io/ https://quicksite.stavros.io/ It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't have to deal with all the update pain.
- EwanToo 6y ago
  This looks really useful, thanks :)
NN88 6y ago
I really wish a longform document/essay/dissertation was done on how impactful the loss of Google Reader but the thriving of Twitter and Facebook ruined the internet and allowed clickbait and shortform incendiary content to thrive.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Every long form article begins with a single sentence! I'd read that if you wrote it.
- criddell 6y ago
  Why not go back further and talk Eternal September? Or maybe about the first green card spam on Usenet? The profit incentive is far more powerful force in shaping the internet into what it is today than any single product demise.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    All of those were key events. The death of Google Reader is and remains important milestone for the destruction of the previous iteration of the web and transition to the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube universe of today. Profit is powerful but control is far more so. Frankly, Google fucked up and bit the hand that fed it. That strategy has been financially successful, but did so at the expense of hyper-stimulating Facebook and Twitter. I'd go as far to say that if Google invested in what Reader had represented, a marginal business like Twitter would have vanished or been absorbed long ago.
    - criddell 6y ago
      According to Google, Reader usage was in decline for a while before the closed Reader. During that time, Twitter was exploding. Reader was a niche product albeit an important niche with lots of important users.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Self-hosting WordPress is a really bad choice in fact. Every self-hosted WordPress blog I follow in my RSS reader eventually becomes a content farm. The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting (WordPress VIP, WPEngine), but at that point, why are you using WordPress instead of Square or whatever? If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.
- rbritton 6y ago
  What do you mean by content farm? I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.
  - mynegation 6y ago
    Content farm means that someone takes over the Wordpress installation via a vulnerability that the owner of the installation did not patch. Then they put their own material to extract the google juice for their links until Google catches up and penalizes the domain.
    - rbritton 6y ago
      Got it. I was leaning that way with my interpretation but wasn't completely positive. The biggest risk in all of the WordPress ecosystem are third-party plugins. Minimizing the use of those and installing something like Wordfence (free or paid) would go a long way towards mitigating that risk. It wouldn't be non-zero, but it'd be acceptably low.
  - diroussel 6y ago
    They mean it gets hacked, and the attacker uses the website to install pages with many links to other websites for SEO of the target websites.
- 6y ago
otachack 6y ago
Neocities is a great place to at least start if you want a static site. You can just create an account and get to making HTML/CSS or just deploy static generated pages to it. It also supports custom domains. If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting. https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
nojito 6y ago
Substack is a great evolution of “blogging” People can just focus on writing.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Substack, AFAIK, doesn't let you own your own domain. This is arguably less of a concern with an email newsletter than a blog, but I confess it'd be enough to make me point back to Ghost, which added full email newsletter management -- complete with Stripe integration, if one wishes to charge -- in v3. (Also, I confess a bit of hesitance with any platform whose TOS restricts content for any reason other than legality, which IIRC Substack's TOS does. If I started a fiction newsletter and wanted, with appropriate communication to my audience, to send out a piece that contained graphic sex, I don't really want my hosting provider to tell me that's not allowable. It's surprising how hard it is to find places that close off that possibility: as it turns out, the vast majority of the commercial internet is not, in fact, for porn.)
  - indigodaddy 6y ago
    Looks like you can, for example, https://www.exponentialview.co/ https://www.exponentialview.co/
- karanke 6y ago
  +1 for Substack, I think it really helps writers focus on getting their words out instead of worrying about distribution.
resume384 6y ago
If anyone is interested in full stack self hosting, I recently started a cloud from scratch resource here. https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch
staysaasy 6y ago
If you are a moderately technical person there are also very low effort solutions that allow you to self host static sites from Jekyll/Hugo totally free. Eg I haven't been a professional software engineer in ~5 years and I could get up and running in ~60min. The biggest issue tends to be that you need to write in Markdown with Git. I advocate for this everywhere because my satisfaction is so high. IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.
- hinkley 6y ago
  In the time since I was last active on Wordpress, the ads have gone from barely there to "I don't like this". I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable. I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure comes from.
petulla 6y ago
Is there an easy out of the box rendering solution for blogging that can be hosted on gh pages, where the posts are md files?
henrik_w 6y ago
I've been using wordpress.com for my blog since 2011, plus paying for my own domain. Nothing fancy, and has worked very well. Good value for, I think, 26 dollars a year. https://henrikwarne.com/ https://henrikwarne.com/
sradman 6y ago
Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on github.io. A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.
- mintone 6y ago
  > A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository Why?
  - webwielder2 6y ago
    I think they mean, "Some modern blogs are written in Markdown and stored in a git repository."
    - sradman 6y ago
      No I don’t mean that. Git and Markdown are the de facto standard for general purpose content and content creation workflows. These tools are as future proof as anything in existence; the acid free paper of the digital age.
      - Tomte 6y ago
        That's absolutely laughable. I'd give XML much better chances to be a future-proof markup, and I'm not even a fan of XML. Especially considering the dozens of MD variations (Vanilla? Extra? GitHub? CommonMark? pandoc?) preclude any future-proof-ness. And all the ad-hoc extensions you do in your application when you want to support (for example) figure tags with alt text, title and caption (not even really possible in pandoc) make things even worse.
        sradman 6y ago
whorleater 6y ago
This truly feels like https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/ https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things! IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  > you've got a dearth of places to blog on "Dearth" means "scarcity"; you probably mean "wide variety" or "plethora" if you like alliteration.
- fenwick67 6y ago
  As someone who has written 3 static site generators, like 5 themes for them, and only 2 blog posts, this resonates so hard with me.
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  From the article: "That led to a number of questions as to where one should create a blog..." So apparently, enough people are at a loss on where to blog that asked him that he thought it was worth a post.
- F_J_H 6y ago
  As options proliferate, it's nice to have a recommendation. I appreciate this post for that reason.
canadianwriter 6y ago
Thought I would pipe in about one thing mentioned. "social media is great for promoting blogs" this was a throwaway comment and not the main point of the article but just thought peeps might be curious. Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog. Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying. the question becomes, what DO they show you? For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM. These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site. The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people. The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views. That brings up a whole host of issues. Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.
AnonC 6y ago
Someone I respect once told me that Ghost is written for its developer’s needs and to promote the hosted platform, and not intended to be an easy to manage self hosted solution. I don’t know how far that’s true, but WordPress seems to be ahead on mindshare (and likely features and plugins too). For better or worse, PHP/LAMP hosts with control panels are aplenty. Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  I've set up self-hosted WordPress and Ghost. I personally found Ghost's "5 minute set up" to be pretty close to the mark (in contrast to all other software that advertises a 5 min set up and takes me half a day of messing around with config + Google + documentation - maybe I'm just slow)
karanke 6y ago
Choosing a blogging host isn't the main obstacle for most people; it is writing consistent, high-quality articles. Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing while starting out. n.b.: I've been writing at https://reframing.substack.com/ https://reframing.substack.com/ for the past 5 weeks.
rdtwo 6y ago
I don’t think he addresses the real problem of where to blog of where and how to blog so that readers actually find you. Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.
z3t4 6y ago
Note that from a SEO and discovery standpoint you bring link power and authority to the domain you blog on. So if you use a platform and not your own domain, then the platform gets all the link juice. Platforms are only good for spammers as they can piggyback on others authority.
z3t4 6y ago
Don't serve your posts from someones database. You can still use a CMS, but make sure the content is rendered statically. Static web sites are 100x faster, more secure, and cheaper to host.
rdtwo 6y ago
Doesn’t google automatically downrank Wordpress sites in the search algorithm? If so why is WP still being recommended?
- gmays 6y ago
  No. In fact, WordPress sites generally rank better due to the free SEO plugins like Yoast--I believe Matt Cutts stated these a while back. Google itself has also built great plugins for WordPress like AMP and Site Kit (https://sitekit.withgoogle.com https://sitekit.withgoogle.com).
- rchaud 6y ago
  Now this is a search algo myth I've never heard of (and there are many out there). Some of the biggest websites in the world have a WP backbone. Why on earth would Google care what blog framework the site was built on? As long as it's not known spam domain and the site generates machine-readable HTML, Google will index it and rank it if it gets a good number of clicks for search terms. Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of self-hosted Wordpress?
  - rdtwo 6y ago
    Maybe I confused Wordpress hosted sites with wP backbone sites. Is there a negative value to wP hosted sites or really any other managed Wordpress deployments?
Traster 6y ago
>The problem — at least from my perspective — is that flexibility is optionality. If one day down the road you want your site to be something other than a blog, but you are using Ghost, you need to go through the same sort of transition process I described above. This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.
xueyongg 6y ago
I personally had some issues figuring out as well. And i realized a markdown file per post kind of approach fits my style really well. It's quick to deploy (1min and your post is deployed and live). A custom website gives you the flexibility to add in features you want, how ever you want it. This is my personal blog and I write about whatever I learn and dig our lessons to apply as a software engineer! Do like my facebook page if you love this idea! https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/ https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/ https://www.facebook.com/asasoftwareengineer/ https://www.facebook.com/asasoftwareengineer/
SkyLinx 6y ago
This thread would be a good opportunity to promote the app/CMS/service I'm working on as another option. I wish I could share already

73 points by avthar 6y ago

I think there's a lot of analysis paralysis on deciding where to blog, so I threw together a quick repo you can just clone, drop some Markdown files in and it'll auto-publish to Gitlab pages and Neocities whenever you push: https://quicksite.stavros.io/ https://quicksite.stavros.io/ It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't have to deal with all the update pain.

EwanToo 6y ago
This looks really useful, thanks :)

NN88 6y ago

I really wish a longform document/essay/dissertation was done on how impactful the loss of Google Reader but the thriving of Twitter and Facebook ruined the internet and allowed clickbait and shortform incendiary content to thrive.

StavrosK 6y ago
Every long form article begins with a single sentence! I'd read that if you wrote it.
criddell 6y ago
Why not go back further and talk Eternal September? Or maybe about the first green card spam on Usenet? The profit incentive is far more powerful force in shaping the internet into what it is today than any single product demise.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  All of those were key events. The death of Google Reader is and remains important milestone for the destruction of the previous iteration of the web and transition to the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube universe of today. Profit is powerful but control is far more so. Frankly, Google fucked up and bit the hand that fed it. That strategy has been financially successful, but did so at the expense of hyper-stimulating Facebook and Twitter. I'd go as far to say that if Google invested in what Reader had represented, a marginal business like Twitter would have vanished or been absorbed long ago.
  - criddell 6y ago
    According to Google, Reader usage was in decline for a while before the closed Reader. During that time, Twitter was exploding. Reader was a niche product albeit an important niche with lots of important users.

earthboundkid 6y ago

Self-hosting WordPress is a really bad choice in fact. Every self-hosted WordPress blog I follow in my RSS reader eventually becomes a content farm. The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting (WordPress VIP, WPEngine), but at that point, why are you using WordPress instead of Square or whatever? If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.

rbritton 6y ago
What do you mean by content farm? I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.
- mynegation 6y ago
  Content farm means that someone takes over the Wordpress installation via a vulnerability that the owner of the installation did not patch. Then they put their own material to extract the google juice for their links until Google catches up and penalizes the domain.
  - rbritton 6y ago
    Got it. I was leaning that way with my interpretation but wasn't completely positive. The biggest risk in all of the WordPress ecosystem are third-party plugins. Minimizing the use of those and installing something like Wordfence (free or paid) would go a long way towards mitigating that risk. It wouldn't be non-zero, but it'd be acceptably low.
- diroussel 6y ago
  They mean it gets hacked, and the attacker uses the website to install pages with many links to other websites for SEO of the target websites.
6y ago

otachack 6y ago

Neocities is a great place to at least start if you want a static site. You can just create an account and get to making HTML/CSS or just deploy static generated pages to it. It also supports custom domains. If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting. https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/

nojito 6y ago

Substack is a great evolution of “blogging” People can just focus on writing.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Substack, AFAIK, doesn't let you own your own domain. This is arguably less of a concern with an email newsletter than a blog, but I confess it'd be enough to make me point back to Ghost, which added full email newsletter management -- complete with Stripe integration, if one wishes to charge -- in v3. (Also, I confess a bit of hesitance with any platform whose TOS restricts content for any reason other than legality, which IIRC Substack's TOS does. If I started a fiction newsletter and wanted, with appropriate communication to my audience, to send out a piece that contained graphic sex, I don't really want my hosting provider to tell me that's not allowable. It's surprising how hard it is to find places that close off that possibility: as it turns out, the vast majority of the commercial internet is not, in fact, for porn.)
- indigodaddy 6y ago
  Looks like you can, for example, https://www.exponentialview.co/ https://www.exponentialview.co/
karanke 6y ago
+1 for Substack, I think it really helps writers focus on getting their words out instead of worrying about distribution.

resume384 6y ago

If anyone is interested in full stack self hosting, I recently started a cloud from scratch resource here. https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch

staysaasy 6y ago

If you are a moderately technical person there are also very low effort solutions that allow you to self host static sites from Jekyll/Hugo totally free. Eg I haven't been a professional software engineer in ~5 years and I could get up and running in ~60min. The biggest issue tends to be that you need to write in Markdown with Git. I advocate for this everywhere because my satisfaction is so high. IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.

hinkley 6y ago
In the time since I was last active on Wordpress, the ads have gone from barely there to "I don't like this". I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable. I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure comes from.

petulla 6y ago

Is there an easy out of the box rendering solution for blogging that can be hosted on gh pages, where the posts are md files?

henrik_w 6y ago

I've been using wordpress.com for my blog since 2011, plus paying for my own domain. Nothing fancy, and has worked very well. Good value for, I think, 26 dollars a year. https://henrikwarne.com/ https://henrikwarne.com/

sradman 6y ago

Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on github.io. A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.

mintone 6y ago
> A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository Why?
- webwielder2 6y ago
  I think they mean, "Some modern blogs are written in Markdown and stored in a git repository."
  - sradman 6y ago
    No I don’t mean that. Git and Markdown are the de facto standard for general purpose content and content creation workflows. These tools are as future proof as anything in existence; the acid free paper of the digital age.
    - Tomte 6y ago
      That's absolutely laughable. I'd give XML much better chances to be a future-proof markup, and I'm not even a fan of XML. Especially considering the dozens of MD variations (Vanilla? Extra? GitHub? CommonMark? pandoc?) preclude any future-proof-ness. And all the ad-hoc extensions you do in your application when you want to support (for example) figure tags with alt text, title and caption (not even really possible in pandoc) make things even worse.
      - sradman 6y ago

whorleater 6y ago

This truly feels like https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/ https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things! IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.

Stratoscope 6y ago
> you've got a dearth of places to blog on "Dearth" means "scarcity"; you probably mean "wide variety" or "plethora" if you like alliteration.
fenwick67 6y ago
As someone who has written 3 static site generators, like 5 themes for them, and only 2 blog posts, this resonates so hard with me.
compiler-guy 6y ago
From the article: "That led to a number of questions as to where one should create a blog..." So apparently, enough people are at a loss on where to blog that asked him that he thought it was worth a post.
F_J_H 6y ago
As options proliferate, it's nice to have a recommendation. I appreciate this post for that reason.

canadianwriter 6y ago

Thought I would pipe in about one thing mentioned. "social media is great for promoting blogs" this was a throwaway comment and not the main point of the article but just thought peeps might be curious. Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog. Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying. the question becomes, what DO they show you? For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM. These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site. The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people. The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views. That brings up a whole host of issues. Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.

AnonC 6y ago

Someone I respect once told me that Ghost is written for its developer’s needs and to promote the hosted platform, and not intended to be an easy to manage self hosted solution. I don’t know how far that’s true, but WordPress seems to be ahead on mindshare (and likely features and plugins too). For better or worse, PHP/LAMP hosts with control panels are aplenty. Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.

sixhobbits 6y ago
I've set up self-hosted WordPress and Ghost. I personally found Ghost's "5 minute set up" to be pretty close to the mark (in contrast to all other software that advertises a 5 min set up and takes me half a day of messing around with config + Google + documentation - maybe I'm just slow)

karanke 6y ago

Choosing a blogging host isn't the main obstacle for most people; it is writing consistent, high-quality articles. Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing while starting out. n.b.: I've been writing at https://reframing.substack.com/ https://reframing.substack.com/ for the past 5 weeks.

rdtwo 6y ago

I don’t think he addresses the real problem of where to blog of where and how to blog so that readers actually find you. Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.

z3t4 6y ago

Note that from a SEO and discovery standpoint you bring link power and authority to the domain you blog on. So if you use a platform and not your own domain, then the platform gets all the link juice. Platforms are only good for spammers as they can piggyback on others authority.

z3t4 6y ago

Don't serve your posts from someones database. You can still use a CMS, but make sure the content is rendered statically. Static web sites are 100x faster, more secure, and cheaper to host.

rdtwo 6y ago

Doesn’t google automatically downrank Wordpress sites in the search algorithm? If so why is WP still being recommended?

gmays 6y ago
No. In fact, WordPress sites generally rank better due to the free SEO plugins like Yoast--I believe Matt Cutts stated these a while back. Google itself has also built great plugins for WordPress like AMP and Site Kit (https://sitekit.withgoogle.com https://sitekit.withgoogle.com).
rchaud 6y ago
Now this is a search algo myth I've never heard of (and there are many out there). Some of the biggest websites in the world have a WP backbone. Why on earth would Google care what blog framework the site was built on? As long as it's not known spam domain and the site generates machine-readable HTML, Google will index it and rank it if it gets a good number of clicks for search terms. Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of self-hosted Wordpress?
- rdtwo 6y ago
  Maybe I confused Wordpress hosted sites with wP backbone sites. Is there a negative value to wP hosted sites or really any other managed Wordpress deployments?

Traster 6y ago

>The problem — at least from my perspective — is that flexibility is optionality. If one day down the road you want your site to be something other than a blog, but you are using Ghost, you need to go through the same sort of transition process I described above. This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.

xueyongg 6y ago

I personally had some issues figuring out as well. And i realized a markdown file per post kind of approach fits my style really well. It's quick to deploy (1min and your post is deployed and live). A custom website gives you the flexibility to add in features you want, how ever you want it. This is my personal blog and I write about whatever I learn and dig our lessons to apply as a software engineer! Do like my facebook page if you love this idea! https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/ https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/ https://www.facebook.com/asasoftwareengineer/ https://www.facebook.com/asasoftwareengineer/

SkyLinx 6y ago

This thread would be a good opportunity to promote the app/CMS/service I'm working on as another option. I wish I could share already