Well, that was quick, wasn’t it? I tried Quartz for like two weeks and now I’ve ended up hosting my own WordPress site, lol. Seems like as time has gone on I just want something a bit more convenient.

Why move to WordPress?

With the uncertainty surrounding social media, I’ve been wanting a place to write, a place I can call my own. For that reason, I was hopping around static site generators for a couple years. For context, these are basically software that builds your site based on templated parts you define and scaffold on. I used them since I didn’t really want to pay for a full-fledged CMS at the time, lol. I initially started with Hugo but became increasingly unhappy with the theme, and nothing else had really grabbed me. With that, I decided to broaden myself a bit and not worry about what SSG I was using. I ran into astro-erudite, an opinionated blog-oriented theme for Astro. It’s a really nice theme, but it’s very barebones, thus being an obvious exposure of an audience problem associated with most SSGs that I’ll get to later.

What didn’t help was that the theme heavily favoured MDX, a version of Markdown that lets you embed components built using React, a framework for embedding user interface components. At the time, my writing app of choice was Obsidian, which has a plugin called Harper for quick spell and grammar checking (and is funnily enough maintained by Automattic). I didn’t want to move away from it, but Obsidian does not really work with MDX, and enabling MDX files didn’t give you Obsidian’s goodies like linked media attachments and even heading outlines. Copying and pasting felt simply felt like another barrier.

So, I figured I’d try something else: find something I like, that worked with Obsidian directly. For a while, I found myself liking Quartz, but there was a part of my brain that wasn’t enjoying the whole messiness of it. See, Quartz’s philosophy is centered around digital gardens, which the relevant subreddit describes as personal wikis or “digital spaces of notes and thoughts”. I do think this philosophy has wheels, and some decisions from my brief fling with Quartz have ended up here, like the separation of reviews, and “shared” posts where I just share things that interest me, a bit like a chronological pinboard. However, it felt like I was using the wrong tool for the job. I wanted a blog, in the old-school personal sense, not the one that’s ruined the art of blogging. Furthermore, to get into the weeds with it proper and try to add some sort of blog-like structure, I had to basically get in the weeds of web development, which isn’t something I’m interested in (and I didn’t feel like asking an LLM either).

And I think that was the moment that made me realise…

I don’t want to be a web developer, but most SSGs assume otherwise.

I want to develop desktop applications. I don’t want to develop websites. Unfortunately, most SSGs assume you have experience with web development, and in particular they assume you’re confident with JavaScript frameworks and package management. I’ve done some HTML and CSS before, maybe a bit of basic JavaScript, but the further I go into the JavaScript ecosystem, the more lost I become. And frankly, my trust in Node.js is eroding after its package managers, npm and bun, have had consistent reports of malware, with the recent news about how malicious packages were used to infect 1,500+ packages on the Arch User Repository. Twice.

While I may have been tolerant towards the friction back then, since being medicated for ADHD I’ve grown fed up of constant high amounts of it. I dropped desktop Linux as a main operating system this year, after over a decade of being on and off with it, because I still relied on Windows apps that didn’t play nicely with compatibility layers or virtual machines, and that caused a lot of friction. And SSGs were creating pretty much the same type and amount of friction and stress that Linux had gave me. That was the signal to start moving away.

Unfortunately, trying to search for help around what platform would suit a personal site gave a lot of noise from web developers, which dominated conversations I tried to find. There was quite a bit of noise about how static sites are the way to go and you should use an SSG and that dynamic CMSes are bloated and whatever. While they are objectively faster than a regular dynamic site, again they are simply too technical for the layman or someone like me who doesn’t want to learn web development just to get my thoughts out there. I’d happily sacrifice speedmaxxing if it meant I have a place I can happily write my personal thoughts on.

Enter WordPress

I don’t think I need to introduce WordPress. Everyone knows what it is. It’s turned from a blogging platform all the way into a full-fledged website builder you can self-host. I gave it a go on WordPress.com and figured it was good enough, though the free version definitely had some restrictions. I did have a bit of wrestling with Gutenberg, particularly on Firefox where it lags, but once I got used to it and tweaked some of the settings to suit my flow, and used Vivaldi instead, I was quickly getting into it and used the site and template editors to make the site more of my own, even with a default theme. I’ve been able to customise my site much quicker and easier than if I had stuck with a static site. I’ve been developing an appreciation for serif fonts and getting that through here was easy. Hell, instead of using Obsidian I’ve written this directly in Gutenberg. (Harper’s Chrome extension doesn’t work in the editor though, rip.)

And for those who want to maintain a digital garden while using WordPress, well, there are people who make digital gardens using WordPress. Chuck Grimmett wrote a post on how he structured his own digital garden using it.

However, I’ve increasingly seen people deride WordPress.com for the lack of control you get compared to a self-hosted instance, and there were concerns over “enshittification” and the behaviour of Automattic’s CEO towards users of fellow Automattic service Tumblr and managed hosts like WP Engine. While I think the concern is valid, at the same time WordPress feels right for me at the moment.

“Self-hosting” my WordPress

After consulting my friends who have used WordPress in the past, I decided that an instance I fully control would be worth taking a look at, and I can happily say that I picked DreamHost, thanks to a recommendation from a friend of mine and some evaluation. All I needed was a host that had a lenient acceptable use policy surrounding explicit content – I doubt I’d post it directly here but I do link to my accounts that do share content from accounts sharing explicit content, and I don’t want to risk it. I found four hosts fitting the criteria, and DreamHost was the best balance of service and cost, especially factoring in other things like bandwidth and storage space. The other three were:

• DigitalOcean Cloudways: Specifically advertised for personal sites but seems like it’s geared more towards developers.
• OVH: The cheapest of the lot (£60-70/yr last I checked) but there are consistent complaints about how awful their support is.
• SiteGround: This was recommended to me by someone who’s worked on WordPress for nearly two decades. The service seems to be top notch but you’re paying for less space and less sites you can spin up. I didn’t know what I wanted at the time, so the balanced specs DreamHost had were more appealing.

Also, when testing iterations of the site, I noticed they had a cute mascot, so if I wasn’t immediately sold before I was now:

That being said, getting my site onto DreamHost was a right faff. Firstly, I had to buy the plan, and initially I tried PayPal and DreamHost was taking authorisation charges out, however I couldn’t get it to link up. I don’t know if it was an ad-blocker thing, but I went and used my card directly… which triggered my bank’s anti-fraud because DreamHost bills the cost of the plan first, then the VAT afterwards. Did DreamHost accidentally made me nearly commit tax fraud?

Then, getting my domain over here was also a right faff. This’ll be a bit technical, I’ll try to explain it the best way I can.

They really want you to use their nameservers, which place your domain and IP address on the internet phonebook, but I’ve already had my DNS settings on my domain provider (Porkbun) for emails, and didn’t feel like it was worth transferring everything over at the moment. Furthermore, if I decide to move this site, or do something different, having it on Porkbun rather than DreamHost means I’m not overly reliant on a host I may not use in the next few years. I was lost trying to find the obvious way to add the domain to the site, and it seemed like it needed to be added during the site creation process which didn’t seem that obvious to me, and then I got the proper DNS (domain name server) settings for adding onto your external domain provider afterwards. I also had to create certificates (for HTTPS, so people don’t end up snooping) through DreamHost instead of using the ones provided by Porkbun, so I don’t need to worry about doing manual renewals, but that was a one-click job.

Once all that was done, everything was sorted and now I have a nice WordPress site. At the moment I am happy about it, and I may look back towards digital gardens and even back to Quartz for other things I want to mess with. DreamHost gives me up to 25 sites and 25 GB of storage, so it’d be fun to experiment with, and I’ve got an Obsidian vault with notes about .NET I might look towards publishing, which would fit the “digital garden” vibe more. I’m also taking the mindset of digital gardens and allowing myself to be unpolished here – I have a perfectionist mindset, and I have to let that go.

Bonus: Alternatives that might suit you

For anyone who wants to give blogging or digital gardening a go, WordPress isn’t the only thing on the block if you want a full site but don’t want to mess with JavaScript stuff. I thought I’d mention these in case.

• Ghost is a really nice alternative to WordPress, and I’d say it’s got a better editor for writing than Gutenberg which is a Swiss army knife of editing. However, the fact it feels geared towards content creators which isn’t the vibe I want to have hurt it for me. WordPress’ flexibility lets me make my site my own without going too far into it, even if a lot of what it targets is business oriented. That all said, if you want a clean blogging platform and aren’t particularly fond of WordPress, go for Ghost. I recommend Magic Pages if you want a host you can trust.
• Publii is a GUI-based SSG that works pretty well all things considered, but I never got along with its post editor for some reason. Might be a perfectionist thing. The amount of themes is sparse in comparison to Ghost, even, but if you don’t care about having a kind of unique looking site then it’s still worth a look though. (this blog uses Twenty Twenty-Three with a custom background colour)
• Quartz I will still recommend if you just want a place for publishing your notes or Obsidian vault. It’s free, it has first class support for Obsidian, and the default configuration is perfect for a pure digital garden with no faffing around in JavaScript. (some terminal experience is still required, though.)
• If you don’t care about hosting a site but you want your thoughts out there, there are a bunch of long-form posting platforms on the Atmosphere, the ecosystem of ATProto, the same protocol behind Bluesky. This means you can basically have your blog post stored on the same place as your Bluesky account. Leaflet is the one used the most from what I’ve seen, but Pckt and Offprint also exist and use the same data that Leaflet does. If you’re a developer, standard.site is the lexicon standard for this.
  • Of course, WordPress also has a plugin implementing ATProto support using standard.site, so I can add this to my AT account if I wanted lol