This will be a quick one, because it’s just me explaining why it’s been a while since I had an update. Mainly, I have been preoccupied with other more pressing matters and this has taken time away from my search. I’m also increasingly skeptical that any alternative will give me what I want, despite my issues with WordPress, which means I might just stay with WordPress. But we’ll see.
I’ll have a more detailed report in Part 5, in which I will have actually tested write.as, as promised earlier.
I am in a quandary. I thought that researching the supposed finalists would clarify things, but I feel I am no closer now to making a decision.
I looked at what I felt were the two best choices–write.as and blogtastic. They have many broad similarities, not the least of which is an apparent fear of capitalization (or love for e.e. cummings). blogtastic has an advantage in price–at least until April 1, 2024, when their pricing increases.
I was leaning toward blogtastic, partly due to that price advantage, but then I checked its showcase page. And…it’s not good. It’s filled with blogs that have clearly been abandoned, or only ever had a few posts. Only one has a post from 2024. All of them have slow-loading images that draw onto the screen like a JPEG on a Pentium in 1998. blogtastic also features testimonials elsewhere on their site. One writer spoke highly of blogtastic. I click on the link to his site–and it’s very fast! Images load instantly. It’s also running on Ghost. Hmm.
Meanwhile, write.as doesn’t show many examples at all. One is in Japanese, and it looks…OK? It’s hard to get a handle on how sites typically look. To be fair, Matt Baer, who created write.as, does have a link to his own personal blog, and it looks perfectly fine. write.as also lets you have three blogs for its price, which is a nice bonus. The editor is clean, but also very spartan. Maybe a little too spartan. blogtastic leans a little more heavily on what I’d call extra features, like footnotes and things. I love that kind of stuff.
After looking over both, I came away completely unsure on whether either would meet my needs.
Here’s a look at pricing, with Ghost thrown into the mix, as it and blogtastic will be pretty close after blogtastic’s price increase. All prices are per year.
All three let you do a limited-time trial, so you can test drive each. Since I have no idea how any of these will actually feel in practice, I’m going to do that next.
Part 4 will be my test run on write.as.
In Part 2, I offer some takes on platforms I skipped, summarize my experiences with ones I’ve tested, and offer some alternatives to blogging altogether.
Here are a few sites I skipped because they focus on text over images, though some do support images.
Some of these may seem pretty obvious, I include them, anyway.
For Part 3, I will be doing more research and narrowing down my choices a bit more.
Here is another cat GIF. The cat is industriously working away on its blog, All the Mews Fit to Print.
Back in January I wrote that I was contemplating moving off of WordPress for various reasons.
Back then, I posted four possible options:
I have narrowed down these options to one (and a half):
The next question is: Which WordPress alternative? Because it turns out there are a lot of options. Like, a lot. Oodles. Too many.
But since my needs are specific and known, I can winnow down the list. If your needs are like mine, this might be useful for you, too. If not, there is an animated GIF of a cat at the end of this post.
My needs (also in the linked post above, but paraphrased here):
Pretty basic stuff, really. If I eliminated photos (I will not do this, but let’s pretend), my choices would be nigh-infinite. I could go for one of many super-minimalist blogging sites. But having no photos would also mean no drawings, which are like photos I put together with my hands and brain instead of a camera. This is a dealbreaker. I don’t want to revive my old Flickr account.
That clears out the wide array of minimalist, text-only sites. What’s left? Still oodles!
Important note: I am omitting blogs that lean into more technical, nerdy skills to set up or maintain, so there's nothing here that installs from a command line or runs from a folder or requires scripting, etc. These follow the flow of: Write a post Click a button Your thoughts are on the internet
Here’s an incomplete list:
And a quick summary of them, with some emphasis on what I’m looking for:
This is probably the most WordPress-like, and it takes the most direct aim at WordPress and its features, claiming to be better/faster and, in some cases, cheaper.
The biggest con is that it’s $9 U.S. per month minimum1All prices listed here are in U.S. dollars. This is a lot of money to record my inane thoughts that could just as easily be typed into Notepad for free. You can also self-host Ghost, which is cheaper, but not exactly a simple process.
Ghost does have another notable pro, though–it can import from WordPress, so the nearly 4,000 inane posts I’ve made here could be carried over.
This is reasonably priced at $5 a month, but has an emphasis on community (not a bad thing if you’re looking for that) and while longer pieces are possible, the focus is more on short, quick posts.
There’s a free plan, with some reasonable limits, so you can try before you buy (note: as of this post, the free plan is listed as “Closed for now”), and it’s $6 per month after if you pay annually. It supports not just photos, but albums. It has a blog community and supports newsletters, which suggests it has started moving away from its personal blog roots.
Pika has a free plan that is essentially a trial–you can make 50 posts, and then you’re done. So if you only ever have 50 things to say, you don’t have to pay! It’s otherwise $6 a month. It emphasizes a great writing experience, has some simple themes, and supports images. It’s also really new, as it just launched at the end of January 2024.
With a name like Blogtastic, you would expect this to be a good blogging platform. It has multiple plans, including Starter for $20 and Expert for $50. Prices are going up on April 1st, though (no foolin’), with new names like Hobby for $50 and Startup for $100. I don’t think the old $20 and new $50 plans match up, though their chart doesn’t make it especially clear.
Anyway, this platform seems to offer everything and has been running for about three years, so it’s still relatively new. It feels like a Ghost competitor and, indeed, they compare themselves directly to Ghost, stating that they are more focused on writing and less on “secondary” things. They claim their gallery management is “robust”!
There’s a $5 per month Founder Plan (good for 10 blogs) and–that’s it! No other options. It keeps things simple. Posthaven bills itself, somewhat weirdly, as “the blogging platform designed to outlive us.” I mean, OK, but I’m not sure if I care much about my blog a hundred years after I’ve departed the Earth for parts unknown.
A major caveat for me is image sizes seem to be limited due to their theming. They mention 800 pixels max, which is tiny and probably a dealbreaker.
Having gone through these, the ones I feel can be eliminated are:
This leaves Pika, write.as and Blogtastic. Currently, only one offers a free trial of sorts, so I’ll give Pika a test-run and do more research on write.as and Blogtastic.
Coming up in Part 2:
Here is the promised cat GIF for this post:
The piece linked below is a very long, exhaustive blog report on why a certain pedestrian bridge exists on I-494 in Minnesota. That might not sound like a subject worthy of a lengthy investigation, but author Tyler Vigen goes on a nerdy, obsessive hunt to figure out why a pedestrian bridge that doesn’t seem to really connect to anything came to be.
Stick around till the end. It’s not exactly a twist, but it is satisfying. This is why blogs are still such a great resource.
The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
I came across ooh.directory, which is a site that aggregates blogs (1,966 as of this post). It’s a pleasant and consuming way to find writing focused on a particular subject or theme that isn’t beholden to algorithms and all that.
Also, I love the bizarre, bold combination of colours it uses: dark green, orange and light purple. And light pink, I think, for text, which somehow works with everything else.
I wanted to highlight two blogs of PIKOTI (People I Know On The Internet). I made acquaintances with both of them through the Quarter to Three forums and like me, they both cherish the romantic dream of writing and getting paid fat piles of cash for doing so.
Matt Bowyer’s blog is nascent, with a mere four posts to date. It’s called Loading Screen and as Matt puts it:
I started this site for two reasons. 1) MattWBowyer.com was available, and since that’s me, I thought I should do something about it. 2) I’m writing a book. Actually, I wrote a book, or at least I wrote a first draft. It’s not too good, but I think it will end up being good.
I shall tease him unto the end of days if he doesn’t stick with his promise to post three times a week. This will be done to help him build character, lots and lots of character.
The other blog dates back from when FrontPage was considered hip. Actually, it was never considered hip, but Jason Pace’s blog was nonetheless started back in 1998, when Duke Nukem Forever had only been in development for a single year. His blog is called Aim for the Head. Quoth Jason:
This weblog itself is just where I ramble about the things I feel like rambling about. There is a smattering of armchair game design. I review every book that I read. I put forth the effort to track down passes for free movie screening and I review them too. I occasionally writing creative things and post them. And sometimes, like this About page, I just ramble.
Looks like Jason may need an editor. I’m available and cheap. And easy.
Jason doesn’t mention it in his About section but he also does this word of the day thing. On Broken Forum he describes it thusly: “I am also now doing a drawing each day based on either the reference.com or webster’s word of the day (I cheat and choose the better word, and also because some days one will have a word that doesn’t lend itself to drawing).” You can see one of the results in this post. This is exactly the sort of neat idea I love to steal borrow.
These are both a couple of super-friendly and helpful guys. Read their words and when the time comes, buy them!
How to Read This Blog, Part 3
by Creole Ned
I’ve made a few tweaks to make it easier for people to comment on my ramblings. First, you no longer need to have me approve your first post but you do need to verify your account through an e-mail check. I’ve also included the option to upload a custom avatar although at the moment they seem to be defaulting to a bit tinier than I’d like. Finally, the Site Admin link has been renamed to Site login to better reflect that it’s where you any reader/user can login to adjust their profile settings or add an avatar.
Enjoy!
How to Read This Blog, Part 2
by Creole Ned
In which I explain the various links for those who are averse to clicking.
Bloggy Friends
Paladin’s Playroom Paladin has been part of my gaming group the Martian Cartel for many years. He blogs occasionally, one of those “when the whim strikes” kind of guys.
Sam-K.net The blog of Samuel Kimpton, man of the Internet! Sam is also part of the Martian Cartel and writes occasionally, focused on things of geek interest and the travails of home ownership. Sam is also a gadget kinda guy. I suspect one day he will build a really smart robot that will lead us to SkyNET.
scatterdad Tim Everett’s blog, since superseded by his addiction to Facebook. Tim owns the house I live in and has many cogent, witty and at times caustic observations. His blog is rarely updated as of late.
Other stuff
Broken Toys Scott Jennings has written about MMORPGs for many years (originally as “Lum the Mad”) and has worked in the industry at Mythic, NCsoft and other companies. His insights are often thought-provoking and amusing if you enjoy the meta discussion about gaming.
Martian Cartel forums The forums for the gaming group I became erstwhile leader of back in its founding year of 1999. We chat about more than just games now but the group has been on the decline for a few years and activity has waned.
My Facebook page Like this blog but with fewer words.
How to Read This Blog, Part 1
by Creole Ned
This site is divided into six categories:
Every post has at least one category attached to it. The content of each category is as follows:
1. Dating There are no entries for this because I am writing about my dating experiences elsewhere, therefore this category should have been removed but I forgot. Oops.
2. Gaming In which I share my gaming experiences or write about games like roughly one billion other people on the web do. As I don’t game as much as before, these posts are becoming less frequent. If you are not a gamer there is probably only a 50% chance you will find my insights worth reading. I arrived at 50% by just making a number up, kind of like a review score!
3. General The inevitable catch-all category. Random nonsense about life, media and anything else that doesn’t fit into the other categories.
4. Health and Fitness Currently I lift dumbbells three times a week and jog three times a week and it is here where I chronicle my hi-jinks, ranging from pulled muscles to getting rocks thrown at me by ill-mannered children. I also chat a bit from time to time about diet and food choices. If these things don’t set your heart a-flutter, safely ignore!
5. Photos When I add images to my gallery I post about them under this heading. However, I am currently debating over how to add photos to the site and my current hodgepodge method means I’m not adding nearly as many as I could. On the one hand, entertainingly bad pictures from my youth are going unshared. On the other hand…well, the exact same thing.
6. Writing Here I talk occasionally about the process of writing and books I have read. Mainly I discuss my ongoing writing projects, whether they are exercises, short stories or one of my novels.
Now that you know more about each category you can better choose how to read through this rich tapestry I call my blog. Or just skip all this and skim for saucy words like “hooters” and “malfeasance”.