Today I had almost signed up for a Wordpress account — again — almost. This past week or so I have been going back an forth in my head about the current status of my site/blog. Mostly the way it looks, the way I would like it to look, its features and functionalities and how I would like it to function or behave. I love Micro.blog, I love the platform, the community and how simple it can be. You open the the app, you jot down some words — publish! Sometimes though, I feel like I’m not entirely happy about how my site looks, or how it behaves or its features. Some of these feature that I like aren’t available across all the templates micro.blog provides, which is why I am always switching back and forth between them. For example right now, as I’m composing this post, I’m using Kiko with an extensive custom CSS script that I did not come up with. I love this theme, it’s my favourite, however it doesn’t have pagination for example. Because of this reason I often end up switching to other templates, hoping they’ll satisfy my “needs”, but always end up back on the same one and the cycle repeats.
Some functionalities can always be added if desired but is not as easy as turning a switch on and off kind of thing. It involves some programming-CSS-coding-witchcraft that I somewhat understand but don’t know much about. It’s like if I wanted my site to behave and feel the way I would like, I need to be some quasi-programmer-wizard of sorts. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo , now you’ve got pagination good Sir!
(Side note: I will always be incredibly grateful with the Slack/Micro.blog community, they’re always so very helpful and sometimes I even feel bad because I’m always asking about something. I feel like I annoy them so much, I’m sure one day they’ll just kick me out.)
All that being said, this is why services like Wordpress are so appealing for someone like me. All I have to do is to signup, give them some of my rupees, select a nice looking theme with all the functionalities I need and almost no tweaks from my part. After that, it’s all about what I put there, it’s all about the content and super easy too. I type a bunch or words in Ulysses and publish from within the app! (I wish they would add support for Micro.blog as well though)
Moving to Wordpress may bring some other problems, though. The same problems that made me move to Micro.blog in the first place. Wordpress always gave this anxiety that my blog had to be a “Pro-blog”, no twitter-like short posts, always long format and with a title. This is what I like, among other things, about micro.blog, I never feel the pressure of what and/or how my post should be.
I don’t know. Maybe I can find a way were both platforms can coexists in some way. I mean, even if I were to move my site to a hosted Wordpress account, I have no intentions of leaving Micro.blog entirely.
Once again, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
