I hate making The First Post on a website, because I always feel a pressure to Get It Right. This is me ripping off the band-aid.1 I am writing this in one stream-of-consciousness, adding the links, and hitting “Publish”.
New site same me! I tried handwriting sites and using static site generators (and writing my own) and using Bear Blog etc etc and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I love each and also find each incredibly frustrating and limited. WordPress, for all its flaws, has, in my testing, been the most flexible and the least frustrating for me and the way I like to work on stuff. It even lets me embed cool shit from an app I love called Tumult Hype. Look at this:
To do that, I whipped it up in Hype (literally just made the objects, then checked the “physics” and “drag” boxes in the menu), exported it as an OAM file, and then uploaded it to WordPress. It’s that easy! And I love that! There’s also a good free plugin for hosting and managing podcasts, and I have a couple of podcast-y projects in mind, so that was a big motivator for the switch too.
Concerns
I’m a massive fan of the IndieWeb ethos, and I think small, scrappy, static sites are part of the point for a lot of people. I feel like I’m giving up a little bit of nerd street cred by using WordPress. I don’t care about it that much, but it is something I thought about when doing this. But the reality is that, when I started using and loving the web around 2005, WordPress was already a thing, and a really popular one at that. This is what the sites I fell in love with often looked like! So this is really fun and nostalgic for me, especially using Kubrick 2024, a theme designed to match the original default WordPress theme.
No, that’s not the real concern. The real concern is that the CEO of WordPress is a massive piece of shit. He’s been actively hostile to the WordPress ecosystem’s open nature, as well as incredibly transphobic. This has been the major reason behind me resisting WP for as long as I have. But ultimately, I have faith in the open source community’s ability to weather this dipshit’s storm, and I’m also not using any of his commercial products2, so I know I’m not supporting him directly. That’s enough for me, for now, but I couldn’t post about WordPress and not mention this asshole.
- I refuse to capitalize this word because “band-aid” is thoroughly genericized, and I no longer respect the trademark. (Or trademarks in general. Or the company Johnson & Johnson. I have beef with the whole thing, you see, except for bandages, which I think are generally good for society) ↩︎
- I’m hosting this site on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the wonderful host I’ve been using for years and years. ↩︎
