My Publishing Platform Journey

Now that I have set up my website it’s time I talk about one of my favorite topics: publishing platforms.

If you know me even a little you know that I have a reputation for being a nomad with publishing platforms. I have moved to almost every platform you can think of. I have been on WordPress, Micro.blog, Ghost, and even Jekyll. Although all have their pros and cons, I decided that the best option for me is Blot.

What I want in a site

Before I get into the reasons I chose Blot I must start with what I wanted my site to be. I wanted to make my website something more personal and less of a brand. Which is why I decided to retire Clicked as a name and just use my name. Going forward anything I make or publish will not be under a brand but rather my name.

With that precident set let’s talk about the things I wanted in a website for both my readers and myself as a publisher.

Ease of Publishing

When it comes to a publishing platform, it’s important for me to have something easy to publish; both at home and on the go.

If I find an interesting article I want the ability to write something up in a text editor and send it to my blog in seconds. Why, you ask? Because any friction for publishing on the go usually means I don’t share anything.

Sure I can save it for later and make time to sit down at my computer and write what I want. For me, making that kind of time is a commitment I don’t always have. So if I am able to make a quick link post sharing something I am reading I am going to do that.

Unique Theme

On top of a blog’s portability, I wanted something that I could make my own and not have it be a cookie-cutter theme. I’ve long wanted to build a theme or website from scratch and make it my own. I looked into making my own theme in WordPress but I figured it would be too cumbersome.

I continued to look into web development from different websites over the years, took those tricks and implemented them where I could on the different websites I made over the years. Still, my itch to make something from scratch for myself was there and I knew I wanted to do something about it this time around.

What I wanted was something I could build upon like some of the bloggers I idolize. People like John Gruber (Daring Fireball), Jason Kottke, and Matt Birchler (Birchtree). They all have built their websites to fit their style and it shows. Thankfully, Blot makes that really simple and I go into detail about it below.

Easy to Setup

Finally, I wanted something that was fast and didn’t need lots of setups to get going. Apart from editing a theme I wanted to hit the ground running.

I didn’t want to have to spend a long time getting some things set up the way I wanted, I didn’t want to screw around with RSS feed setup, or connecting a bunch of services to make everything work the way I wanted. I wanted to simply set up my site information and get started making the things I wanted to make.

Publishing Platforms

While it is nice to have all this in writing now, I instead decided to dive head-first into each platform and see where my pain points were with them. So here was my journey to pick the best blogging platform for myself.

Ghost

The first option I chose was Ghost. I have used Ghost in the past and loved what it had to offer. I wanted to use it because at the time I still planned to keep my previous newsletter, Clicked, alive. I love the interface of Ghost and I love what every theme it has to offer. For Ghost, I decided to use the theme Arun, which I paid for. I came to a point where if I wanted this newsletter to work though I either had to set up the backend for it myself or I had to pay through the nose for Ghost Pro. Both options were something I wasn’t interested in giving a lot of time.

Ultimately this was where I decided that I didn’t want to continue Clicked and I didn’t want to pay a lot for a Ghost website.

Jekyll

This was a very short-lived endevour, but it was an important one for me. If you aren’t aware of Jekyll it is a lightweight blogging platform that goes back to 2008. Jekyll is a static website builder, meaning that once you set it you can forget it. It allows for sites to be blazing fast because of its simplicity.

Jekyll had what I wanted in a platform, something static that allowed me to send markdown files and they would publish without any hassle.

The reason Jekyll was so short-lived is because I realized that it required backend knowledge I didn’t have. The problem was I didn’t make the jump from Jekyll to Blot. Instead, I decided to try something more conventional.

Micro.blog

Micro.blog is an open-web blogging service created by Manton Reece. He created it as a way for people to own their content and have their own websites instead of relying on a small number of social media websites.

Manton Reece:

I believe that even these short-form posts, no matter if they seem unimportant and fleeting at the time, still have an important place on the open web. That’s why I created Micro.blog.

I love what Manton has created and I wanted to support it with both my money and my website. I decided that micro.blog wasn’t what I wanted due to a few small but important issues I had with it.

I wanted something that was easy to post to, and while I could use a third-party app, if I wanted to edit that post due to an error it would need much more work. While I don’t often go in to make changes, when I do I want it to be fast and simple. Micro.blog doesn’t really offer that currently.

The other issue I had was that I wanted to make my site unique, but editing the themes on Micro.blog is clunky and often hard to get right. It has come a long way from what it used to be, which was a text editor without live previewing. While live previewing has made things easier, it is still difficult to edit the themes. I am sure there are people that think that Hugo, the backend to Micro.blog is easy to work with but I could never wrap my head around it. I have tried many times and every time I hit a roadblock and I don’t have the knowledge to find a solution.

WordPress

Finally, after trying all the alternative blogging platforms I decided that it was time to revisit WordPress. WordPress is great if you want to just start writing and get your thoughts out there in the world. If you are fine with a cookie-cutter theme, WordPress is for you.

Sadly, one of the tentpole reasons I wanted to build a permanent site was because I wanted to design and build something that I both understand technically and enjoy looking at. After several hours of finding a theme to start with and editing it to my liking, I thought that I had WordPress set up as I wanted. Then came using it for writing and publishing.

I decided that I was fine using the WordPress app because it can be easy to use and fast to make changes if I needed to in a pinch, the problem was my hosting service. I wanted to use EasyWP, a NameCheap hosting service. It offers cheap hosting that doesn’t break the bank and enough storage for me not to have to worry about it. Sadly when I went to set up the WordPress app nothing seemed to connect to WordPress. After several different attempts and different passwords created nothing worked. The reason for this is that EasyWP has XMLRPC disabled, which means it cannot talk to apps of any kind to send or retrieve posts made on the site.

After this was brought to my attention I decided that I would try another hosting service, Dreamhost. Dreamhost did work for me to use the app which was a sigh of relief. Yet, I absolutely hate how many toggles and switches it has. If I were to write a quick link post, which I often do, I would be spending more time setting up things like the post type, tags, featured image, SEO information, and slug than I would writing the actual post.

I decided then that while WordPress was a decent option for me it was too clunky for what I wanted. It was close to what I wanted but I needed something more lightweight.

That was when I finally decided to use Blot, a static site generator that turns files into blog posts.

Blot

Blot is a platform that I used in the past, much like most of the above platforms. That said, when I used it before I don’t think I had enough HTML and CSS knowledge to know how to use it.

After some time learning more CSS tricks and proper HTML over the years it finally “clicked” for me. The theme files in Blot are straight HTML and CSS using Mustache for variables and templates. Tack that on with some amazing documentation and examples Blot offers I was able to start with a blank theme and build what I wanted.

After a Sunday in front of my computer, I was very happy with how it all looked. I had made it so I had different post types, which in turn changed the colors to match the theme.

Orange for standard posts, Blue for links, Purple for podcasts, and Red for videos.

After I had the colors, I wanted to use icons as well for the post titles. I knew Font Awesome was a great option for WordPress so I decided to play with it in my templates here in Blot. To my pleasant surprise, it was rather easy to use. Just paste a bit of code in your and you are able to then start using Font Awesome icons for free.

After some more tinkering, I am finally happy with the look of my website both on desktop and mobile, which is something that I care about and others do as well.

Aside from the theme the process to post to Blot is dead simple. Create a directory with either Dropbox, Google Drive, or Git. Once made, Create a file Blot supports (.txt, .md, .png, .jpg, .gif, .docx, .odt, .webloc, .url, or .html) and put it in your Blot directory. Once done you can see it on your site in seconds.

The beauty of this is that you can create Shortcuts that allows you to make posts rather easily. After all it’s just plain text files you are editing.

Not only does Blot offer simple and easy publishing it also offers a place to store drafts, files, and more.

Conclusion

There is something about building a site that is 100% your own. Not just the content, but the look and feel of the site as well. It brings a more concrete sense of ownership, and for that reason, I don’t plan on leaving Blot anytime soon. It provides me with an easy way to build the site I want and publish the content I want without friction.

I am not a developer and I am sure the code I am using to build this website is either outdated or convoluted. That being said, if anyone wants to use this theme you can download it here or install it on your Blot website here.