There and Back Again: A Bloggit’s Tale

Photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash

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:

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.

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.

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.