I swear to God, I’ve spent extra time re-skinning or “re-theming” my web site over the previous decade-and-a-half than I’ve completed anything. It’s had extra reinventions than Madonna. After I first began running a blog in 2010, it was on a free platform referred to as Blogspot and this platform – offered by Google – did nearly every thing for you. Which was nice, as a result of none of it may break. A lot. You selected the type of weblog you wished, from a predetermined (and extra importantly, pre-made!) choice after which you may select which color you wished your headings to be and which font you’d like your phrases to look in and you may tinker about with issues like your navigation bar (menu) and create issues like “tag clouds”, which have been funky visuals exhibiting individuals which key phrases you used most. Your Blogspot couldn’t crash from an excessive amount of site visitors, or load weirdly since you’d made some amateurish mistake along with your coding making an attempt so as to add a subtitle to each web page; you didn’t should know html, or tips on how to add one thing to your database utilizing an FTP shopper and also you completely didn’t have to spend over 395 hours (true story) trying to make your weblog homepage seem like one thing that had been constructed by a tech group of over twenty builders, full with dwell Instagram feed, pop-up subscription types and a video of your showreel enjoying on a loop behind your emblem. However then issues took off and plenty of bloggers wished one thing a bit extra skilled and so all of these aforementioned issues turned a continuing bane. Most of us knew a tiny bit about web site constructing however this was a studying curve so very steep that each handhold on the facet of the mountain required not less than just a few hours of heavy Googling and trawling of assist boards. Effectively. After two full weeks of making an attempt (in useless) to tug off the newest Madonna reinvention, which has left my web site really wanting worse than it did within the first place, I’ve had sufficient. Final week was imagined to be my week off, and I spent the whole lot of it discussing WordPress migration points with a chatbot referred to as Kaydee. However now I’ve a tough choice on my fingers, as a result of I can’t very effectively sack the entire thing off altogether and begin once more. Even when I do now weblog from Substack, I nonetheless have over 3,500 posts on my web site that I’m reluctant to simply ship off into the ether. And tens of hundreds of individuals nonetheless take a look at them each month – that’s not a quantity to be sniffed at, is it? And a great deal of them are actually good, or actually humorous, or are only a very nice reminder of various occasions in my life. Take a look at this put up, for instance, written in March 2010. Method earlier than youngsters, approach earlier than home strikes – I didn’t even personal a cat!
