So I am moving my personal blog to a new solution at the end of 2019. I looked around at the numerous options and decided that making my own site using WordPress.org was the best move.
Use LinkedIn for blogs?
I originally looked at using LinkedIn to do blogs. Since one of my main reasons to do a blog in the first place is to support my online business presence, this made a lot of sense initially. LinkedIn feels like a better platform for my business purpose than FaceBook or Twitter or (insert other).
So LinkedIn does have some blog-friendly features, especially related to publishing and sharing content. However, if you consider it as the only blog source it throws a curveball if you have other reasons to do a blog. So, for example, I want to push out a list of my current TV shows so I can share it with family and friends (this is always a hot topic in my circles), well that would be awkward on LinkedIn.
So I settled on LinkedIn as a promotional avenue for business-related blogs, but in that case, I’d use a different main source for the blog and simply re-post/link on LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn is out as the primary blog platform.
Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Tumblr?
I immediately ruled out Twitter, Facebook, and other heavy social media sites. My blog is not intended to be extremely frequent content and it would simply be overwhelmed by the deluge of per-second content feeds from those services. This is in addition to my aversion to social media sites both censoring my content and then owning it. Bleh.
So I looked at Medium.com. Long-form content is very attractive and I like the overall mission (no advertising) and could probably deal with the extremely limited toolset. However, there is a critical “flaw” in how Medium works – for people who may want to browse my blog, they would have a hard paywall on Medium. The one requirement of my blog is: if I happen to get someone interested in an article, they must be able to read it anonymously and without paying anything. So, Medium was out.
I re-looked at Tumblr, which I have used over the years for specific purposes. But when I logged back into Tumblr, I found one of my old blogs I did for a specific project was wiped out. Well, how about that. I understand that using services also means you can be subject to… blog annihilation. That’s not great, so I think moving on from Tumblr is in order too…
WordPress.org is the answer
As I then looked at the long list of other options it hit me that I probably could just stop digging and run my own site with the free software from WordPress.org. This would obviously hit all of my goals: no advertising, no restrictions, no paywall, no sudden censorship or extermination… And since making websites is a snap using services like GoDaddy… Ok, done deal.
So here we go with my new blog site. I have zero direct experience with WordPress but full confidence that I can get through whatever I need to. And I already had a GoDaddy account I can create sites on. So… that was about 30 minutes ago, which is about how long it took me to create the site, create the MySQL database, upload the WordPress software, log in and write this blog.
So far, good start!