Yesterday I talked about the two most challenging aspects of starting a blog, namely deciding what to write about and what to actually call your creation. Today I am diving into probably what is the next step in the process, that is where to put your content. I need to make a bit of a disclaimer. I use WordPress and have done so for the last decade and some change. That is likely going to make me a little bit biased towards that platform. However I’ve also used blogger and a number of the other tools I am about to talk about.
One of the first decisions that you ultimately need to make is just how invested in the process you are going to be, both from a financial standpoint and from time investment standpoint. Ultimately technologies are going to fall into one of two buckets that I feel like you need to understand before we get any deeper into the weeds.
- Managed – A managed solution is largely one that is hands off to the users. What I mean by that is you won’t have to patch anything yourself and will always be on the latest version. You simply insert your content and move on with your life. As a result you will have less freedom to make significant changes to the tools and will largely have to deal with things that are going to frustrate you just because that is how the software works. If you have no server management or programming experience and don’t really want to change that, then this is probably going to be your comfort zone.
- Self-Hosted – If you like to tinker with things and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, then you might be interested in installing and setting everything up yourself. This is going to give you absolute control over exactly how everything functions on your site. However this also means you are going to need to be constantly vigilant in your patching and maintenance of the site. Every single day someone is looking to compromise your self-hosted site and you have to be prepared to fend off those attacks. If the thought of this stresses you out then it is probably not for you. However if you have a deep instinct to fiddle with things until they are just right, then welcome to the land of having to SSH into servers!
Mostly to this point I have talked about time investment, but there is also the aspect of monetary investment. A lot of the “free” options also offer a subscription plan that adds some additional features. If you are going the self-hosting round you are going to need a handful of extra things.
- Hosting Plan – You will need to effectively “rent” server space from a provider and this varies wildly in pricing and features. In both cases their most basic single site hosting is less than $6 a month. However these can scale up depending on the sort of things you want access to.
- SSL Certificate – Now that google shames sites that do not have one… I would suggest that getting an SSL Cert is just part of the game these days. Again this is going to vary based on your choice on option one. My host for example gives us free LetsEncrypt certs, but others only support the paid variants that can be anywhere from $30 a year to $200 a year depending on encryption level.
- Domain Name – You are going to need a name to send people to your hosting. Some of these will be included with your hosting plan, however you really need to read the fine print to make sure that you can take your domain name with you if you choose to sever the contract. If you are registering one on your own these generally range between $15 and $30 per year depending on the registrar.
There are a bunch of ancillary fees that can happen as well. For example I purchased the theme that I use which gave me a lifetime subscription and the ability to use it on as many sites as I like. If you decide to dip into podcasting there could possibly be fees for hosting the MP3s. Essentially self-hosting could possibly be a money pit and you need to go into it prepared for things like bandwidth overrages to be a thing you may have to at some point deal with when your site pisses off some group of miscreants and they fire down a DDoS on you.
Managed Free
Today I am mostly going to dig into the free options that are managed because they allow you to get something started quickly. On another day I will dig further into the whole self-hosted thing.
Blogger
Blogger has been around forever and offers a great jumping off point to blogging. It requires you to have a google account, but at this point I think everyone has one of those as google now owns our soul. Back in the days of Google Reader this was a really compelling option because it had lots of baked in tools for directly connecting your BlogRoll to it. The site allows for some basic customization, allowing you to tweak some of the settings if you know basic HTML/CSS. It offers some of the better support for posting by email, if that is a thing you want to do.
The big negative that I see with blogger is the fact that it is connected to Google. Google has this bad habit of canning products that they cannot figure out how to monetize. The death of Reader made me deeply question the future of Blogger as a platform. It hasn’t really received much in the way of updates since 2016… other than recently stripping out support for the now defunct Google Plus social network… aka another thing that Google killed. That said Blogger has seemingly survived until now and may surprise me and be something that effectively lasts forever.
WordPress
WordPress effectively comes in two variants… WordPress.com the managed option and WordPress.org the self-hosted option. The managed version also offers subscriptions, but I am going to largely be talking about the freebie version. What you get is a pretty solid option that allows you to write posts and post images. You have a bunch of themes to choose from, but really can’t do much with any of them apart from change some colors or slap a logo on them.
To get any real customization you need to start ponying up for a subscription plan that will give you a lot of the functionality that the Self-Hosted version gives, but honestly never quite as much. WordPress excels at allowing you to snap functionality in through plugins, and the Managed variant has none of that support. The biggest thing it has going for it is the ease of which it is to move a Managed site to a Self hosted site. I think the biggest benefit here is that you could start out with something small and free and decide you wanted to branch out into something bigger without much hassle. There are tools to export Blogger to WordPress as well, but it is nowhere near as seamless.
Tumblr
If you just want to write some text and throw some pictures of video with it, and don’t really care much about the rest of the features… then Tumblr may be for you. I’ve used it quite a bit over the years and have my own Tumblr blog that I syndicate content to. I am not the biggest fan of Tumblr as a whole but it gets a firm “It’s Fine” from me. The main reason why I would use Tumblr over something else is one of two scenarios. Firstly you mostly want a photo blog, but want the ability to throw words with those photos in something that makes more sense than an Instagram. The second reason is if you are part of a community that has already planted its flag on Tumblr and decided it is home.
I spent minimal time on Tumblr as a content delivery medium, but I weirdly do have several followers there that consume Tales of the Aggronaut in that manner. If you are already reading Tumblr then you might as well turn it into your blogging platform.
Medium
I largely feel like Medium was started as a place for when a Twitter post isn’t enough. However it has evolved into a really solid means for writing content. If you don’t care about the look and feel of your blogging experience, but you want really solid text crafting tools… then Medium might be for you. It is the most boring and bland presentation as far as sites go… white background and black text. However if you are a minimalist at heart it might appeal to you. The only time I have used Medium is when I want to write a story that isn’t necessarily connected to my blog, because thematically it doesn’t really make sense. It is PERFECT for that, but I’ve never actually followed someone on Medium directly. It is possibly the least bloggy feeling of the blogging options?
I am certain there are other tools out there that might fit your needs. You should in theory make a perfectly reasonable blog with a Facebook page for example. Ultimately you need to find what works best for you personally, and I feel all of the above options are a really great starting place. They all let you get started within minutes of signing up for an account and post content. As I said earlier I will dive into the self-hosting thing a bit later, because it requires a lot more care and feeding.
I have a Blogger page somewhere – I liked it a lot, but then it fell off and people weren’t really using it as much. Plus it was really weird trying to follow people on it.
I use WordPress the most, which is still not a lot. I DO like that I can be ore free to make it special for me. I’m still trying to figure out how to make my page look nicer.
Tumblr is ok…I like it and am on it the most. But it can be a pain to try and type out long posts. I’m trying to figure out how to link my blog to it. What I do like a lot is that I can follow all the weird and obscure things I like. A down side to it they changed their image posting policy. As in if they think it is adult content it will be flagged. I had my page blocked because apparently posting a picture of a tribal woman in her traditional tribe outfit that showed her nipples was “BAD”. I got my page back eventually.
Never heard of Medium.
There is a online journal called Monkkee.com – it is a private journal that is password protected where you can post things. I have been using it more to write my stories and store pictures I don’t want to loose. Yeah no one but you can see it, but it can be exported.
But thank you for writing this…