I’ve finally come full-circle. From WordPress, to Ghost, to Wardrobe, and now back to WordPress.
Don’t get me wrong – I definitely loved the Wardrobe project. It was minimalist, simple, easy to use. The problem there were these small things that they haven’t perfected yet that I kept yearning for – things that WordPress has had for years. Somehow, I kept asking myself, is it worth it to hold out for these updates or do them myself? Or do I just want a simple blogging platform that I can put my thoughts into and not have to worry about anything else?
When I realized that I wanted the latter, I started my quest in searching for the perfect blogging platform again. I checked out some of the statically-generated blogs (Jekyll, Hyde, Octopress) and other blogging frameworks (October CMS, Drupal) as well as hosted blog providers (Svbtle, Squarespace, Weebly). All very fine candidates, but the feature set still left me wanting. After a few hours of searching, I decided to take a breath, start fresh, and list down all the things I really want for my blog:
- Easy post management (drafts, scheduled publishing)
- Easy to use WYSIWYG
- Ability to customize the post with media (e.g. embed videos, images, etc.)
- Commenting system that allows for multiple identification gateways
- My own domain
- Categories or Tags (both not really necessary, they serve the same purpose mostly)
- Cheap, free if possible
- Simple, minimalist design, or allows for themes
- If themes are available, lots of themes to choose from would be a great nice-to-have
After considering all these things, I knew at once that the best way to get all of these is to simply re-host my own blog again. I already had a Digital Ocean droplet (referral link warning) where I was hosting all my other sites, so it made sense to do a simple WordPress install on it. I picked out a nice, minimalist theme (Tonal, by Automattic) and I was up and running in less than 15 minutes.
In the end, I feel really great to be back on the WordPress system. Although it’s gotten a lot of flack in the past, I still feel that its maturity has allowed it to lead the pack of blogging systems out there. It’s definitely got a lot of unnecessary things, but for my purposes, it does the job, and does it well.