2 min read

Spring Cleaning

I've migrated this blog to Ghost because I got sick and tired of WordPress. It's bloatware and you need a plugin to do anything.
Spring Cleaning
Photo by Callum Hill / Unsplash

New blog, who dis? Yes, I've done some spring cleaning and things look different. I've migrated this blog to Ghost because I got sick and tired of WordPress. It's bloatware and you need a plugin to do anything. My entire SEO rankings dropped like a rock. It was slow as molasses but I liked the writing interface, it was less frictional.

I spent the last month thinking of returning this site and my Neural Market Trends blog to a Hugo-based CMS. I did that for the latter and created a new side blog called Markets and Shenanigans on top of it. Those two will remain Hugo-based but this site? I have other ideas for it.

For starters, I did get used to the integration of iAWriter into WordPress. It allowed me to seamlessly write using my favorite editor and then "one-click" deploy a draft to that blog. On top of that iAWriter integrates nicely with Medium and Ghost. Substack? Not so much. Hugo? No way.

Substack and Hugo generate too much friction for me. I don't have time to spend on writing YAML (no matter how much I love it) and doing all the manual SEO work. I want to focus on the main thing, the content I'm writing, and add a pretty picture to the top of it. I desire a fast CDN and good SEO out of the box and good uptime.

Why? Because for the past two years, I've been writing up a storm over on Medium and created two publications. The most popular one is Weathered and it's my collected works on climate change, the environment, and the nature of work. Little did I know it but I caught the Dragon's tail a few times and watched my membership grow over there.

Yet, the problem I have is that I'm not solely a niche writer, which modern Internet content writers say you have to be to get anywhere. I have an interest in many different topics and have many different likes and dislikes.

This broad focus makes writing a niche blog on Substack and Medium hard for me. Plus, the relentless drive to churn out content over there makes it feel like a second job more than anything else. Writing is supposed to be fun, right?

Do I have any plans for this place? I'd like to say yes but every plan I tried in the past fell out of favor. I'm just going to focus on writing whatever tickles my fancy and If I know myself, there'll be manic weeks of one topic followed by manic weeks of another topic. One month I might be writing about owning gold and silver and the next I'll be writing fantasy games.

That's why my tagline for this site remains "Hyperdimensional Writer and Maker" with a small addition, "Technologist."

Thanks for being here.