Most WordPress sites that are about WordPress are hellish landscapes of popups, sticky headers, SEO desperation, and a cluster of other things ruining the experience, and I’m sure they’re all “available as a plugin”

@jack yep

@jack This is exactly why I hope to never see plugins for Micro.blog.

@simonwoods Oh I don't know. Could we hold out hope that the use and type of plugins we'd see for Micro.blog would exercise the same restraint and good taste as that of the most of the posts here? (I must be feeling especially optimistic this morning). :)

@jack Death by plugins is what happened to me on WordPress. While being extremely flexible, using WordPress makes you want to try to extend it as much as possible until the whole thing creaks to a halt.

@jack maybe we need a curated and closely maintained store of some sort ;)

@simonwoods I think you're onto something! Oh wait... :)

@pratik I'm trying very hard to resist the urge to pile on the plugins myself. It's working...mostly.

@simonwoods oh I think that's a bit short sighted. A lot I do requires custom theme work, and to attract the long tail you need flexibility that doesn't require writing code. It may need some stewardship, but I want to point people to a plug in and not "here's how you add this shortcode I wrote" or rely on Manton for any feature.

@manton

You should have to work really hard to make a M.b site terrible

The correct approach, IMO :)

@manton Oooh! A challenge! :-p

@Tales Haha. NooooOoooo.

@jack It's definitely a problem with WordPress. In my case, there's usually something I want to do, but I'm not technical enough to do it, so I look for a plugin that does that thing ... sort of. But it's not exactly right, so I find another plugin. End result is a bunch of plugins, none of which are exactly what I wanted, but all of which create clutter and other issues that I am not technical enough to fix ... and so the circle begins again. There are things I wish MB would let me do, but what makes it a huge win IMO is that it's just simple and I can stay focused on blogging and not plugin management.

@jack Like many, that's more or less how I ended up here for my personal blog. In the last week, I've been working on setting up Ghost for one of my professional sites, it's unbelievalbe the difference between it and WordPress. Loving Ghost so far, even if it's less plug-and-play and requires a bit more effort for management on the server side.

@pratik @manton this is exactly why I opted to Micro.blog instead of Wordpress.

@philly @jack @manton same here. I have tried Wordpress, hosted my own, tried and hosted Ghost, but I ended up with Micro.blog. Would be nice to know that there are things to come, but please -- a thousand No's for every Yes - invidio.us/watch

@SteveSawczyn @manton I completely agree! I was excited with my Wordpress site and spent a huge amount of time setting up the site. In the end, I realized that I was (actually am) trying to understand the ‘technical’ side of website building and having less time on generating content. M.B. gives me the simplicity of, let’s say, Instagram, but the pride and joy of having my own domain with a network to reach out to.

@DrKnittyGritty @SteveSawczyn Thank you! Glad to hear you like it.

@DrKnittyGritty very well said, captures my thoughts exactly. :-)

@manton This got me so excited that I'm using a well-worn Surface Pro just to get my basic work going again. 😂