this blog of mine

Will I write 22 posts tomorrow?

This would ensure1I can never remember if I should use “ensure” or “insure” I maintain my average of two blog posts per day (62 for the month of January), an arbitrary metric I settled on a few years ago to keep the ol’ writing juices flowing. Don’t ask what’s in writing juice.

The answer is very likely no. But it would be kind of amazing to see what I’d write over the course of those 22 posts.

I must conclude this post with typing cat.

Blog Question Challenge, 2025 Edition

This apparently started on Bear blog, a minimalist blogging service, where people answer questions about…blogging!

I’m not going to tag anyone or anything, but I love lists and answering questions makes a list, so here are my answers to the Blog Question Challenge.

Why did you make the blog in the first place?

This blog, creolened.com, was started on February 2, 20025– nearly 20 years ago! The first post is here: Bloggity blog blog

That short post doesn’t explain why I started the blog, but does suggest blogging was a hot thing in 2005, and I wanted in on it. Also, I like writing and rambling, so a blog seemed like a good place to do this. Journals and diaries are fine (I keep a daily journal now and have kept journals in the past as well), but there’s something about having my thoughts hanging out in public that makes me write a bit differently. I have a voice and it comes through regardless of whether I am writing just for myself (diary) or not (blog), but there’s a little extra zestiness when I write on the blog. I know others can see what I’ve written. It adds pressure to at least check for typos. And maybe organize my thoughts and make them occasionally interesting.

Also, I find writing about something, then referencing back to it years later is just neat. And handy.

Mostly, I started the blog because I like to write and have things to say. Those things are not always serious or well-articulated, but that’s why this blog never had a particular angle. It’s just me rambling.

Why did you choose bear blog?

Sorry, bear, I tried you and liked you, but you are too minimalist for me, because I am a weirdo and spend too much time playing around with formatting and images and junk like that. It’s a fine service, though! Hopefully the person running it isn’t a monster. There is a weirdly large number of monsters on the internet these days.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

WordPress was my first blogging platform. Prior to it, I posted on various forums, and had a gaming website I updated by editing the HTML files, then seeing how things looked in Firefox 1.5 or something.

I have more recently dabbled/tested many different blogging platforms. Search this blog to find my thoughts on them!

Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

It varies, but most of the time I write using the built-in WordPress editor. I occasionally use the Classic block editor when the block system, uh, blocks me from doing what I want.

Sometimes I write in other apps and then copy and paste over. For a time I thought of doing this permanently, so I’d always have a local copy of my stuff, but it just seemed like more work than I wanted. Other programs I’ve used to write for this blog:

  • Notepad
  • Notepad++
  • iA Writer
  • Ulysses
  • Obsidian
  • Maybe Microsoft Word at some point?
  • Probably a few others I’m forgetting

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Never! Inspiration comes and goes, and I have yet to observe any particular pattern to it. Sometimes I can get up and write a long, lovingly handcrafted post first thing in the morning, other times I scramble to find a cat pic to post at 11:30 p.m. It just depends.

I will note that when I am feeling down, I rarely feel inspired to write, so I reject the idea that one must suffer for one’s art (or writing). On the other hand, writing about weird or bad things that have happened to me is something I enjoy doing after the fact, when I’m at least one step removed (see my recent ER visit for an example).

Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately, baby. Sometimes I will look over the post for typos or awkward phrasing just before hitting Publish or just after it goes live. If I come across the same in an old post, I fix these things.

If a post is especially long or complex, I will sometimes save it as a draft, then come back later to finish it, but most drafts tend to go to the place where drafts die. Then they die.

Your favourite post on your blog?

At the time of writing this, I have 5,462 posts, so trying to pick a favourite one is pretty much impossible. I used to maintain a small list of favourites, but tossed it aside at some point.

Rather than specific favourites, I’ll list a few general themes:

  • Some of the writing prompt posts are entertaining, and not bad when you consider they are written in the moment, without any editing afterwards.
  • Some of my own (silly) writing prompt lists still amuse me. Others don’t, so this is definitely “your mileage may vary” kind of thing.
  • Birding posts with actual photos are nice. I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting the photos, but I’ve still got some decent ones up for viewing.
  • Some of my art is okay! These are found under Creative.
  • I tried to learn how to swim in 2009. It didn’t go well, but was kind of funny.
  • And more. I have a billion tags because I am a chronic tag abuser, but some of the odder ones sometimes have cute/interesting posts to go with them.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I have redesigned my blog multiple times through the years and will no doubt do so again. Right now it is sporting a more minimal look, with little colour. I’ll probably change that again sometime.

The biggest upcoming change will be moving to a different platform. I am still thinking through this (and have documented the process here on this blog, to go all meta). I no longer have confidence in the WordPress platform, and it’s really more than I need. I am very used to it, though, so moving to something new is going to have a learning curve, accepting certain compromises and other stuff. But I feel I should, and the time to do so is pretty much now.

And that’s about it. Here are some other people who also took up this challenge:

Experimenting with Ghost. Spooky!

UPDATE, December 22, 2024: Corrected a few things based on a reply from the person who hosts Magic.Pages!

MagicPages.co is a Ghost hosting site, and they offer both reasonable pricing, plus a 14-day free trial. Today, I signed up for the trial and created a mock version of this very blog. I tweaked the default theme a bit, made a post, then duplicated an existing post from here to see how easy it was or wasn’t, and how it looked vs. WP.

Here are my initial takes.

Pro:

  • Clean, simple interface. WP has a ton of cruft and junk I never use, and the thing I do most often–post–is not made particularly easy or accessible. Ghost streamlines everything down to a minimalist UI that makes it simple to write posts.
  • More options are always close by. It’s only a click away to do more complex formatting or access other features. Again, the UI feels honed, and focused.
  • It has a nice selection of themes, and you can create your own (though it’s not that simple).
  • No plugins needed! It has image-handling options that are much nicer than WP’s, and they’re just there.
  • If you want to have members/subscriptions, it’s easy to set up.
  • ActivityPub integration is being worked on, meaning I could blog and share easily to Mastodon, the one social media site I haven’t completely abandoned (yet).
  • I can use all emojis, to excess. Always to excess.

Con:

  • Most themes are locked behind a higher-priced tier, as are custom themes. Wrong! The head of Magic.Pages, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, wrote to me to let me know all of Ghost’s official themes are supported in the Starter plan. The Pro plan is required for custom themes.
  • The number of fonts is limited. I’m not sure how easy it is to add more (edit: It looks like it requires haxing the backend to a degree).
  • While the UI is great, the overall level of customization seems lower overall. I love tweaking, but maybe too much, so this isn’t necessarily a con.
  • How do I turn off the copious subscribe buttons? One is enough.
  • No easy way to import my WP site, which begs the question, what would I do with the old site? I am not going to manually copy over 5,400+ posts. Probably. (Note: Ghost.org does offer importing, but only with their even-more-expensive tiers.) UPDATE: Yearly plans do get support for importing, so I was basically wrong here, too.
  • The two cards it supports are for the worst social media platforms: Facebook and X.

Overall, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I am fussy and unsure. I have about two weeks to make up my mind about this specific host, though.

I changed my logo and realized why it looked familiar…

The new logo uses the same font but adds an underline and changes the colour from all-orange to green and yellow. Green and yellow work well together, but there was something a little too familiar. Then I realized it.

I had created the Subway logo.

So now I have to change it again.

My Subway-ish logo:

Fake edit: I’m going with this for now. At least it doesn’t make me crave a six-inch chicken sub.

Not a fake edit: Now I’m trying a yellow and gray version. I’ll probably keep changing it, but won’t update this post every time, so the true level of my madness will not be fully revealed.

Where will this site be in 2025?

Probably not on the moon. But never say never.

The WordPress 6.7 update got pushed out tonight, with a few new features. Normally I’d be interested, but since I’m actively trying to find a replacement for WP, not so much now.

Speaking of, I have one more major platform to try: Ghost. There will be others, but this is the main contender that’s still left.

Currently, Posthaven is looking decent, but not quite there (but maybe?) with Pika and Scribbles as lesser possibilities (I love Scribbles’ UI, but it focuses almost exclusively on text).

I’ll try to test Ghost soon™, but I have to admit I’m a little burnt out on all the options and fiddling and whatnot. I really hoped Blogstatic would be The One, but it wasn’t. They are making some changes soon, and I gave them feedback that they seemed to appreciate, so I may look at it again at some point. 

UPDATE, November 18, 2024: Blogstatic has rebranded to BlogMaker and eliminated all plans in favour of one that gives you unlimited blogs. Neat! But now, instead of paying $50 per year for a single blog, you pay $25 a month for as many as you want. So if you only want a single blog, this is now six times more expensive, or a 500% increase in price, if you prefer. This puts Blogstatic BlogMaker firmly in the HELL NO category.

In the meantime, I really want to post the cat typing GIF again, but I won’t. Instead, this:

I am not going to spam 14 posts tonight

14 posts is how many I’d need to post in the next four hours in order to get my desired monthly average of 2 posts per day.

I mean, I could cheat and do it pretty easily:

  • 14 one-line posts
  • 14 posts of cat pictures (so tempting)
  • 14 posts highlighting a “best of” post from this blog, based on my own arbitrary criteria
  • 14 letters from the alphabet
  • Breaking up “The 12 Days of Christmas” and adding two brand-new things, like cows a-mooing or crows a-cawing or whatever.
  • And so on.

But I am doing none of that.

Probably.

My nigh-hopeless search for a WordPress replacement continues

I didn’t realize Blogstatic has an 8-day free trial, but it does! I have two days left on mine, and while I was initially enthused about it, because it seemed to tick so many boxes, I find it has some issues:

  • I don’t particularly like any of the few themes it offers
  • Customization is rather limited
  • I don’t want to go deep into the plumbing to modify a theme more to my liking
  • Limited image support (no lightbox or click-to-enlarge support that I can see, though it’s possible I’m just a big dummy and am not seeing these things)
  • Some of the editing interface is a bit confusing (which is something of a burn, when you consider how cluttered and messy WordPress’s editor is)

This means none of the following sites I’ve tried have really hit everything I want:

  • Pika
  • Bear
  • Scribbles
  • Posthaven
  • Blogstatic
  • Write As
  • Possibly others I’m forgetting

All of the above are perfectly fine (or even great) for posting text, but I also want to post photos and drawings, so image management is important, and they all fall short in some way when it comes to that. I am sad.

I still have a Ghost trial to experiment with (kinda pricey), and there are other sites I’ve probably overlooked. Doing searches for WordPress replacements yields a lot of stuff designed for SEO/commercial interests, not just little sites for hipster bloggers not looking to be a content farm.

I will report back with more on this hopeless quest soon™.

In the meantime, here is a cat blogging furiously.

Posthaven: Initial thoughts

I decided to give Posthaven a shot. You can view my extensive archive of (as of this writing) one post here: https://stanwjames.posthaven.com/

As a WordPress alternative, it strips blogging down to its basics. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s make a list (or two)!

The Good

  • It’s very easy to use. I was able to jump in and have things set up in a few minutes.
  • It’s affordable! At $5 U.S. per month, it gives you up to 10 blogs (!) and as far as I can tell, you can only pay $5 per month, which means no year-long commitments. Want out after the first $5? Easy-peasy!
  • It has a few nice themes to get you started.
  • Editing posts is simple.
  • Adding images is easy, and it automatically lets you click to expand on them. Other embeds (YouTube, etc.) are also straightforward.
  • It has tags. I like tags. Maybe too much.
  • People can easily upvote, comment or subscribe to your blogs.
  • An RSS feed is available.

The Not So Good

  • A large part of the ease of use is found through its limited options. You get some basic formatting options, and that’s about it.
  • It only has five themes. If you want to create new ones, you can, but have to dive into HTML and CSS.
  • It has no spelling checker, and LanguageTool does not seem to work in its text editor. This led me to editing my one post about seven times as I kept finding typos. I make a lot of typos.
  • Images are not displayed in any kind of WYSIWYG way and they are sized based on the theme.
  • Its feature request page only has two features as “planned”: more themes and markdown support.

The site describes itself as a work in progress, so I don’t ding it too much for being a bit barebones. The UI is simple, but very easy to use, and it’s one of the few blogging platforms I’ve been able to jump into and get posts out of that both look good and are easy to write/edit.

Still, I’m not ready to go all-in. I must continue to experiment before leaving WordPress behind.

That whole WordPress drama, again

An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:

  • I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
  • I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
  • To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
  • I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
  • When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.

I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.