Sitting in my office, working through some thoughts, and I think “it would actually be pretty cool to post these as a weekly blog”. No videos, minimal images. Just a set of thoughts which I consciously share with the world. Curated to fit the image of me I want people to see. So, I head off into the we-browser, and I start looking at what I want to do.
We start with the idea (which I stand by) that WordPress is your friend. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
If you want to start a WordPress site in 2024, you need to consider if you are going to go with the vanilla free offering from WordPress.com, or if you should look into one of the hosting options. You also need to remember that Automattic has been having a bit of a public spat with one of their previous(?) partners, and who even knows where that is going. Also, AI and LLMs are going nowhere, but I don’t want my site to be scraped for some kind of cleverness. What options do I need available, and what do I need to turn off? The options start to multiply. Also, I do actually a little bit care about security and privacy, for myself and those (maybe two or three people) who choose to visit my site. So now I’m starting to think about cookies, GDPR, POPIA, and other privacy things – very quickly leading me to think that comments should be turned off. But if you turn off commenting, and don’t let people register to an RSS feed or similar, how will you build a community making it worth publishing this thing?
Alright, so I have spiralled into the community aspect of blogging. Oops? That wasn’t really the point. All I wanted was a place to publish my thoughts and projects. Which isn’t one of the massive social media giants, open source or otherwise. So, back to what I really want to do. I want to be able to publish my thoughts and opinions on the internet, in a safe and manageable way. Hopefully allowing people to learn from my experiences, and if not, at least to entertain them with my mistakes.
But my career choices start poking their heads out. I’ve done back end development for a long time. I’m not a WebDev person, and every time I try, I give up with a migraine after about an hour. So I really do need something so simple that the least tech savvy grandpa could run it. So, back to the research.
I can probably pay for the simple “personal” plan on WordPress.com, but why is it billing me in Euros? Have I somehow linked my account to another country? Maybe, but even going through all the options in my account I cannot find where that might be set. So, another distraction. That’s great. Oh! But Pippa, you ask, why not use the free plan from WordPress.com? Well, that would be because I am a first principles kind of person. I have a domain registered, and I would like to use it (I use it for my email already). I don’t want this to be the kind of thing where I have “wordpress” in my URL. Right. Decision gets made, let’s pay for a couple years of hosting in the simplest plan. I’m sure I can upgrade later if I need to, or do something migratory. Bearing in mind, that whilst €48 for a year seems acceptable, in ZAR it is pretty pricey. (Obviously varying based on the state of the world, and the political situation in South Africa. So that comes out to well over R900. Even looking at the other hosting options, there aren’t many better options. So hopefully what I am doing is paying for simplicity. If not, I’m going to be sad about spending money. Oh. Of course. These people are Europeans. Or is it Americans? Either way, they only add VAT after you click “checkout”. Because who doesn’t want a surprise €7.20 added to what they’re paying. We’ve hit half the price of a new pair of hockey shoes, and I haven’t even achieved anything yet.
Money spent, I do a little DNS dance to get everything connected. For those who have played with DNS before, this is a really simple experience. WordPress gives me a couple of IP addresses to put in an A record, and reminds me to make a CNAME from www.pippah.net to pippah.net (without which things can get weird). And done. If you haven’t played with DNS before, then this could be pretty overwhelming. My domain is hosted in Amazon Route 53, and I did have a moment of doubt when I launched the “add a record” wizard in my hosted zone. There are a whole bunch of really cool and complex options which aren’t necessary for a simple blog. Thankfully, I could choose the first option, add some records, and get one unhelpful error message. Why? Well… given that the error message said something along the lines of “you did your A record wrong” I had to figure that out. Thankfully, I have played with these things before, and I know how infuriating the R53 error messages can be (the only thing worse is the API design, that’s a whole other rant). So, I could go through, and realise that rather than creating one record with two destinations (correct) I had created two records with the same name and different destinations (not correct). Easy to fix, no further issues, click the “validate connection” button in WordPress and away we go! This thing should now be “alive”. Also, I’ve been at this for over an hour. All I have done is get the site registered.
Did I mention front end work gives me a headache? An hour of prodding at the WordPress stuff and I had to change focus. But we return to the dance, now attempting to put some semblance of structure on this blog. I know what I want, and in theory it should be pretty simple. The real question is if I can convince things to look the way they should… I suppose by the time this post is up, you will know what I settled on. I will say, I have a memory of templates being a lot more interesting than what I was finding as I set things up. In some ways this version of WP is far more powerful than I expected. The ease with which I could upload an image, and set the alt-text if required was fantastic. But trying to figure out where to change the theme which in theory manages which templates I could use for a page or a post? That ended up being somewhat beyond me. Once again, foiled by my desire for simple things to be simple.
Having eventually figured out the themes, and pages, and published things so that at least it is a real website and not a garish blue “coming soon” thing, I now really need to figure out how to apply patterns to posts to make it look good? Or to just categorise blog posts so that I can do clever links in certain places? This could get odd… But hey. I made it. I may have had to navigate more hurdles than I expected, but apparently if you’re willing to spend a little (at least three hours, which I suppose is a lot less than the amount of time if I tried to over engineer it like usual) time and effort (and money) you can just have a blog.
Pippa Hillebrand 