After months of instability, I have finally landed on what I think will be the final resting place for my website. WordPress seems like the best option for customizability, ease of use, and long-term stability, and I want to share how I came to this seemingly obvious conclusion.
This all started just over a year ago when I bought the domain brighamskarda.com with the dream of starting up my own website. I mostly just wanted a place share with the world things that are important to me. Inspired by https://stallman.org/ I wrote all my own html, CSS and JavaScript to create my very own simple website. I still admire the simplicity of that original website.
This website actually serviced me really nicely. For many months, I wrote articles and added features to it as I needed. But it definitely had its downsides. The biggest by far was the subpar editing tools. Every article I wrote was done in HTML, or markdown with limited spell and grammar checking. Then every time I wanted a new feature it was time consuming to implement it into the website.
I originally hosted my website on Cloudflare as they offered a generous amount of free stuff. Unfortunately, they make it really hard to set billing caps though. So even though I only had a little bit of stuff in my R2 buckets, it was nerve-racking just knowing that at any moment I could be hit with a huge bill because of a DDOS attack or a post exploding in popularity. So, I switched to hosting my website on a VPS. Getting that setup and keeping it running was just too much work though.
This made me start to look for other options. And by far my biggest grievance was the stupid designs most site builders force you to use. Menus were always hidden, and headers were always too large and complicated. You would be surprised how hard it is on most platforms to set something up where you can just have a simple header, footer, and centered page content. They all feel the need to add so many useless features and sidebars that make the website look ugly and bloated. Even the website you are viewing now is at the limit of what I think is clean and simple.
In that search WordPress came up, but I couldn’t find a theme I liked and apparently did not spend enough time working in the editor myself to figure out what I could do.
So, I landed blogger. It was free, the themes weren’t great, but I was familiar with it and I and I didn’t need to worry about it too much.
It still had its problems though. Mainly lack of customizability. I couldn’t layout the website how I wanted, and if I ever wanted to host custom pages, or specialized content it didn’t make things very easy.
This weekend I gave blogger another chance. And realized it was the solution I was looking for. I looked at the site editor again, and it turns out that it does give me the customizability I desired. It is also the most used web platform in the world which means it’s never going away. It also means that if I want to switch who’s hosting my website it is super easy to export all of my content and move it somewhere else.
Most WordPress sites have fairly strict storage limits which turned me away initially, but then I discovered bunny.net. It’s a storage and distribution platform like Cloudflare, but it allows you to actually set a billing cap. So instead of worrying about getting a life-altering bill, website functionality will just be limited until I decide what I want to do.
So, I hope you like my new website, and hopefully there won’t be a major redesign for a nice long while.
Leave a Comment