Tag: site

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what I said. So how is it that the personal blog is back on WordPress and off of Micro.blog?

First, it’s all Jack Baty’s fault. Okay, not really, but given Jack’s preponderance for changing blogging platforms every other week and posting about it on Mastodon, he certainly is responsible for planting a seed. His posts at least made me think about things beyond a “the grass is always greener in the other pasture” perspective.

Really the reason is three-fold:

1. I don’t really use the social aspects of Micro.blog, and given that, it doesn’t make much sense to use it as my personal blog when I can do the same thing on WordPress for less money.
2. And yes, another reason is financial: I already run the old blogs on Dreamhost, as well as the on-hiatus Big Fat Geek Podcast site, along with the site for a new endeavor, and all the email thereof, on a grandfathered-in plan, so it just makes sense to save the cost of a Micro.blog subscription and move back.
3. Finally, I realized I never really felt comfortable within the Micro.blog ecosystem. Maybe it was just the long-term familiarity with WordPress, but there’s something to be said for that familiarity. I never felt Manton was out of reach on support issues, and I enjoyed two great themes by Matt Langford. The best way to describe it is Micro.blog felt like wearing Sunday best, and WordPress is more like a really comfortable t-shirt and jeans, and I’m a t-shirt and jeans guy.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Micro.blog as a blogging platform, especially for newbies, or for spinning up a new blog. It just ultimately wasn’t for me with where I’m at, having been blogging at Retrophisch for over 20 years, so it was time to move on.

Speaking of the move back, major thanks to the Dreamhost Support staff. While it was easy-peasy to spin up WordPress on a new site in the Dreamhost panel, I was running in to issues when attempting to use the Copy Site function. Given that I hadn’t blogged all that much since I made the pronouncement that I was sticking with Micro.blog, I just wanted to copy retrophisch.com over to retrophisch.net, then I would manually move the rest. I reached out to Dreamhost Support, and not only did they go ahead and copy everything over for me, they updated all the URLs within WordPress from retrophisch.com to retrophisch.net.

I also decided to lean in to the “retro” part of my online moniker, and the fonts currently being used for content are IBM Plex Mono for body text, and Inconsolata for headings and the like. I’m loving the old-school look.

Some time ago, I was going back and forth on my choice of blogging platform. (Totally a #FirstWorldProblem.) WordPress was working fine, but felt heavy, which to be fair, it has become in some ways, at least for my own use. Not that that should detract from its versatility as a content management system, but it felt like a little too much for a personal blog.

Retrophisch.net was living here on Micro.blog, and while I was treating this as my main blog, it was essentially being mirrored over at Retrophisch.com, run by the aforementioned WordPress. Mid-May, I stopped doing that, committing myself to Micro.blog going forward.

Well, kinda. More on that in just a moment.

I have a future plan, months down the road, for retrophisch.com as a professional site. More on that when those plans come to fruition. I think in the mean time it may become just a landing page or a one-page personal site, a la what you find at About.me and other such sites/services.

I flirted briefly with moving Retrophisch.net to Blot.im. I love the simplicity of text files and images synced from a Dropbox folder. This was directly related to my earlier post about decoupling the domain from Micro.blog. And by the time you’re reading this, the domain should be reconnected, because I’m staying put.

In the end, moving from Micro.blog to Blot was simply trading one kind of friction for another, and the tradeoffs ultimately weren’t worth it to me. There were some minor things design-wise I wanted to do, and moving from the Kiko theme to Matt Langford’s Tiny Theme for Micro.blog allowed me to do those in short order. Matt is very active with the theme’s development, and has made all sorts of customizations possible, so I’m set for the road ahead.

Own your own domain, own your own space

I have long been an advocate for this concept: have your own domain name, and own your own space on the Internet. Own your own email. Stake out a homestead. Sure, you can use other services—you can see the ones I’m on at the bottom of each page on this site—but ultimately, everything is on your home base. Those in the know call this POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

So yes, micro posts and photos you may see here you may also see on my Twitter or Instagram feeds, but they were here first, and even if those services were extinguished tomorrow, my posts remain here.

This is, after all, a personal blog, my little corner of the Internet. And thanks to the work Manton has done with Micro.blog, it’s a lot like blogging was in the early days, only without the hassle of hand-coding the HTML & CSS yourself (unless you feel like tweaking things). So my posts can just be posts, without a title, should I feel like they don’t warrant one, because that’s how it was back in the hand-coding days. (The dates for each post contain a permalink for the post.)

There’s still a lot of work to do. Lots of clean-up from imports I never did, and this is ongoing as time allows, what with work and family. But the place has been given a new paint job and tidied up a bit, so we can keep cleaning up the basement. 😃

Update, 14 August 2024: I’m now making use of Matt’s new theme, Sumo. It’s rather opinionated, and I love it.

So remember when I said a few months ago that I was staying put? Yeah, not so much.

As it turns out, I already had at my disposal a blogging platform that fit all the needs I was looking for—micro posts easily mixed with longer blog posts—and that I was already paying for: Micro.blog. I was one of the Kickstarter backers of Manton Reece’s project back in 2017, and have been pretty much cross-posting my social media (mainly Twitter) musings to it ever since it launched. When my Kickstarter-reward plan expired, it was a no-brainer for me to keep my subscription going. The platform has steadily improved, and for where I am in my blogging life right now, it checks all the boxes I need it to.

So if you only follow me here, you need to point your browser or RSS reader to Retrophisch.net. And thanks for sticking around here all these years!

So my experimentation with Ghost as a new blogging platform is, for now at least, dead. My conclusion: I didn’t want to be stuck running the behind-the-scenes of another blogging platform, which is what I was doing with my own installation of Ghost on DigitalOcean. And yet I didn’t want to pony up for a Ghost Pro installation while I would still be paying for my existing setup, where I have more than just this blog and email.

So for now, staying put with WordPress on Dreamhost. My installation is pretty lean as it is, and I’m used to it. I do plan to migrate from the .com to the .net, because it just fits with the online moniker.

If you are new to blogging, however, and are looking for a fast, easy to use, and worry-free platform, I would recommend giving Ghost a look. Should my needs change in the future where I think they would best be served by moving to Ghost Pro, that is definitely the direction I would move.

I’m firmly blaming Tim @smith (on Micro.blog) for my having spent the afternoon retooling my site’s theme to a modified version of WordPress’ Twenty Twenty. 😉

Hurray for the Twentig plugin!

Occasionally, those follow-a-link-from-a-link-from-a-link blog trains land you in a thought pattern that ends up in a situation of “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” And so I have arrived at disabling all comments on the blog. Jon Saddington’s post convinced me to take the plunge, and I even used the plug-in he suggested. Took less than three minutes. Easy.

Why do this? I don’t expect a lot of comments, for one. I don’t post often enough for conversations to happen, unlike my friend Michael’s blog. Second, I don’t need another time-wasting distraction that is approving or not approving comments, or going through the ones marked as spam looking for false positives. If there is a need for reader interaction to take place, they can hit me up on any of the major social platforms, or use the contact form. Finally, this blog should be about me writing what I want to write, not writing what I *think* people want me to write. Disabling comments helps that focus to happen.

And now I have one less thing to worry about.