Back to Blogging

Back to Blogging

Hi Friends!

I spent my last few evenings learning about http://indieweb.org, https://micro.blog/, and trying to revive my personal blog. Things are still a little rough around the edges, so bear with me as I slowly customize the theme, and make things nicer.

I’ll write some thoughts in another post about why I’m getting back into blogging. But for now I wanted to say thanks to Danny and Colin who both inspired me to take the leap and to start hitting publish.

On the technical side

This time ’round I decided to roll with WordPress for my blog. I haven’t used WordPress for several years, but after doing a bunch of statically generated sites, and using Ghost pretty extensively; WordPress seems to still be the best option for straight-up blogging.

Another benefit of WordPress is the huge plugin ecosystem. For example, I was able to install a Indieweb plugin, get a brief overview of all of the related indieweb plugins, and install the ones I cared about. I’m excited about things like webmentions, and cross-posting via micro.blog.

For deployment, I’m using Trellis, and Bedrock by Roots. There was definitely a learning curve on these tools; but seeing as I’m entirely unfamiliar with the current WordPress ecosystem, I was pretty stoked to figure things out and get things deployed. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how much these tools improved the deployment/management experience of WordPress. Especially using composer for dependency management and installing things in a sane/versioned way.

When I was choosing a theme to start from, I wanted to make sure everything plays nicely with microformats and all the fancy indieweb stuff. So I’m using “Indieweb Publisher” which you can learn more about on the wiki.