My blog’s overwrought theme copingmechanism.com

@jack That’s actually really nice, clean and easy to read. What made you switch away from Blot out of curiosity?

@pimoore I love Blot, but I started wishing for a 1-stop shop for my blog: Easy photo posting/sizing, galleries, comments, analytics, webmentions, all basically built-in. WordPress makes all that easy. Too easy! :). Baty.blog is still on Blot, but is idle at the moment.

@jack I hear you. I like Wordpress for the ethos and philosophy but it has gotten too complicated as a true blogging platform. I restarted my old blot account and am liking it. Especially when I need to fiddle with a word or two and can fix it on Dropbox.

@jack Yes, that’s the problem I always found with WordPress – the themes are designed to be looked at and admired, rather than used. But it sounds right to stick with WP. Even I’m thinking of going back to it after handrolling webmentions and comments on my static site, which has been built on Jekyll for 6 years.

@leonp I much prefer the idea of static sites. Baty.net was run on Hugo for a long time. In real life, though, it's harder to live with. I started a new test blog with Hugo yesterday, though, just in case :)

@jack @leonp What always kept me from wanting to use WordPress the most was twofold:

• not wanting to self-host or administer a server
• fear of security vulnerabilities, especially for plugins if they stop being developed or don’t receive timely patches

@pimoore they’re both problems. There are ways to harden up your install, even on cheap hosting, but dealing with that sort of stuff is dull. The godawful markup, css and JavaScript of some plugins, the clunkiness of the editor... I might be talking myself out of the idea.

@pimoore when I used Wordpress last it felt like a job to manage it

@pimoore @leonp Makes sense. Self-hosting has gotten easier with things like the 1-click stuff at Digital Ocean. I'm (barely) good enough at server admin so I muddle though. The security issues are real. I try to mitigate that by using as few plugins as possible and only choosing those I feel I can "trust". All of this would go away if I used a static site but 🤷‍

@leonp if I hadn’t been hesitant already you might have talked me out of it too. 😆

@hjertnes @pimoore As long as I don't veer too far off-script, I just have to click "Update" once a week or so. It's fine.

@leonp I spend most of my editing time in MarsEdit or Ulysses, so I get to avoid the editor, which is good :).

@jack yeah but you also need to keep the server updated

Plus Wordpress is a very common target because of how many that use it

@jack @leonp @hjertnes I’ve got the chops to self-host, but I just never wanted to take on that responsibility, and good hosting plans are more than I want to pay each month. To my mind, Blot/Micro.blog strike a perfect balance between low friction to post, cost, and control.

@hjertnes You're right. I find it to be a fair trade.

@pimoore I love them all! That's my whole problem :)

@pimoore if you want a $5 linode can do it

@alongtheray I was wondering about that but webmentions seem to work great using the Webmention plugin and IP2. Am I missing something?

@jack If it works great out of the box with the plugin then yer not missin' a thing. Good choice, IP/IP2 has always been on the top of my list as a style I like.

@jack for the best. My static site just eats Markdown, which is the best editing experience, I reckon. I was quite happy publishing stuff without comments for 6 years, but then the indieweb came along.

@pimoore I guess there’s always Wordpress.com, which I think lets you install plugins and themes if you shell out a few quid? Might be worth looking at a child theme, I suppose.

@leonp why wouldn’t more people be using that option instead of self hosting, is it a speed and performance issue on wp.com? That also still wouldn’t solve potential plug-in security issues, even if it removes the need to admin the core software.

@pimoore wp.com is like 4$ for a simple site. I have one. Easy. Fast. I just hate the editor.

@jack I just made my own cms and that’s just as much work.

@hjertnes That's fun! But the only thing worse than having to update WordPress all the time is not getting any updates unless they're done by you! 😝

@jack self-hosting WordPress recently convinced me am not ever going to self-host any blogging platform myself. I am tired of maintaining my writing and the place where I write.

@jack On themes, I have a got a decent theme for myself and first thing I do with any platform is modify css to get it close what I have (I have had a similar look with Hugo, Blot, WordPress and now with Micro.blog). If a platform doesn't allow modifying css, it's not for me.

I like that one. It seems there's a dearth of solid, simple, sort-of-oldschool themes around. Thanks!

@pimoore That's what I use. Been a happy wordpress.com user for years.

@pimoore I guess if you’re going full, purist indieweb you wouldn’t use wp.com for the same reasons you wouldn’t publish to Medium first?

If anyone’s going to stop your wp site getting hacked, it’ll be wp. I think you can only install from a subset of plugins available in the wp directory, too, so I assume it’s as secure as can be.

@leonp it looks like you can only install plugins on the Business plan or higher, which at $33 USD per month ($41 CAD) is more than I’d want to pay. So I’d be back to self-hosting which I’m just not interested in. That being said, I’d use Wordpress before I ever used Medium.

@pimoore ouch, that’s pricey. Yeah, way too much for a personal site, especially since I’ve got used to paying, erm, zero for the last 6 years on Netlify! The just perfect system that allows for notes, essays, photos, webmentions, comments, portability and a simple editing UI doesn’t seem to be out there yet.