Blogging Wisdom Project Part V Introduction
We are reaching the end of my six-part “blogging wisdom” project in celebration of The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. For our penultimate entry, I will tackle a subject which has the potential to nip a potential blog in the bud (a fitting way of phrasing the matter for The New Leaf Journal): Deciding what tech to use and how to host said blog. Before continuing, I note from the outset that I will not be telling you or anyone else what you should use for a blog. Instead, I will offer my own thoughts with reference to interesting articles and blog posts from around the web concerning what prospective or current bloggers and internet writers should consider when making the decision, and perhaps more importantly, about how to prevent settling on blog tech or platforms from becoming a form of procrastination.
My Experience
Because this is my “blogging wisdom” project, I lead off by throwing my cards on the table and explaining the tech stack I use here. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I quote from my February 2026 Blog Questions Challenge Answers article:
Both The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social are WordPress sites. By WordPress I mean WordPress the software, not the service. I did not actually choose WordPress. One person I was working with on the project in the pre-launch days decided to go with WordPress and set up the original install of NLJ on Bluehost. It would be more accurate to say I inherited WordPress than chose it.
The New Leaf Journal has been a WordPress website since its inception. Back in 2022, I moved it from Bluehost to a Hetzner VPS server, but I doubt any visitors who did not read my contemporaneous articles on the move would have noticed. I have dabbled with other platforms, but the only non-WordPress tech I regularly use for publishing is Buttondown, which I use for my weekly Newsletter Leaf Journal.
I have subjective opinions about different platforms and methods of creating and hosting blogs and websites, but my learned “wisdom” is WordPress software-focused. To be sure, I could have put together a “blogging wisdom” post about using WordPress, but that would have been of little interest to people who already use different software, tech, or services for their blogging and online writing projects.
I cannot speak from experience about choosing a tech stack or service for a blog because I did not go through that process in a meaningful way in the first instance. But I can apply what I have learned from administrating and writing for two WordPress-powered websites and one Buttondown-hosted newsletter to offering more general advice for people who are deciding how to approach starting a blog or writing project.
Means and Ends
In An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure, I wrote that “‘productivity,’ properly understood, must be ordered toward producing something of value.” In short, the proper motivation for wanting to be more productive is the desire or need to produce something of value. Productivity discourse in the abstract tends to produce materials about being productive, often without reference to something actually being produced. While my essay was not tech-focused, the same principle applies to tech with full force. Cal Newport astutely noted noted “that many digital productivity tools paradoxically make us busier, rather than better at our jobs.”
If the proper end of productivity is concrete production, what is the proper end of a tech stack or service in the context of a blog or writing website? I humbly submit my opinion that the proper end here is publishing words on the internet, ideally words that are pleasant or useful to an interesting reader or better yet of some perennial interest. I do not discount that there may be some cases where the tech stack is the main point. One can write a blog about running a blog or a blog focused on exploring one tech stack or platform or another. But in the ordinary case, a tech stack, host, or platform is the means to the end of publishing something of value on the internet.
Susam Pal, a self-described “strong proponent of running personal websites on your own domains and publishing your writing there,” described how – as I would describe it – enthusiastic bloggers sometimes conflate means and ends:
I often participate in discussions pertaining to authoring personal websites because this is an area I am passionate about. Any discussion about authoring websites that I take part in seems to drift, sooner or later, into tooling. Aspiring personal website authors worry at length about which blogging engine to use, which static site generator to pick, which templating language to choose and so on.
While I would not go quite so far as to agree that “none of this is important until you have published at least five articles on your website,” at least for the general, rather than tech-inclined, blogger, I concur that focusing excessively on issues such as tooling and engines can distract from the essential purpose of a blog or writing website. There are three obvious ways that conflating means and ends can lead a prospective blogger astray.
Firstly, settling on how to build a blog or where to host it can prevent one from starting a blog at all. Every minute one debates whether to use one static site generator or another or choosing between two platforms is a moment that person is not spending working on publishing on a blog or writing website.
Secondly, to quote Susam Pal again: “It is easy to spend days and weeks polishing a website setup, selecting the perfect generator, theme and deployment pipeline, only to end up with a beautifully engineered website whose sole content is a single ‘hello world’ post.” A blogging workflow is not of much value if it does not lead to the production and publication of blog posts and articles. This danger also applies to running a blog. I will confess there have been times where I spent more time tinkering with The New Leaf Journal than drafting articles. Ana Rodrigues’ Overthinking my blog offers a good example related to implementing IndieWeb technologies on her website.
Thirdly and more subtly, an excessive focus on the laundry list of items noted above can seep into the blog itself. Now I preface what I am about to say by stating for the record that I am not opposed to blog posts and articles about technical issues related to running a blog or the art of blogging. See e.g., yesterday’s article and the article you are reading here. Moreover, I follow a few blogs and writing websites that primarily focus on topics related to running blogs. But it is easy for a blogger, especially a beginner blogger, to find him or herself writing and publishing about having a blog rather than what writing what he or she was originally interested in writing or publishing about.
In my previous “blogging wisdom” article, The Emu Café and Blog Hospitality, I prefaced my thoughts as follows:
[W]e can proceed with the assumption that if someone publishes his or her writing or media on the open internet, someone else may stumble upon it. I will also assume arguendo that someone who publishes his or her writing or media on the open internet is, at a minimum, not opposed to someone else reading or viewing it.
I hereby incorporate that assumption into the following assessment: Unless your blog is about using a specific technology or service related to running your blog or about blogging-related topics (e.g., blogs about the IndieWeb, blogs about mastering WordPress, or blogs about using Substack), the average person who stumbles upon your blog will care more about the content (so to speak) than what you are using. I doubt that people who read articles on The New Leaf Journal care that I am using WordPress the software on a VPS server instead of WordPress.com the service. In fact, were I to move the entire website off WordPress, I suspect my loyal fans would go on just as well so long as I kept publishing the same kinds of articles. Do people who read my newsletter care that I use Buttondown instead of Ghost or Substack? I am inclined to doubt it.
Speaking for myself and as I will discuss below, I prefer in a vacuum running one’s own site. It is a matter of choice whether it is by means ofWordPress the software instead of the service, a static site generator-created site, or the like, instead of relying on platforms. But having noted that preference, I quote from my ECS post Re; The Indie Web Is Not Defined by Its Enemies:
There is good writing on Substack, Automattic-hosted WordPress sites, and for-profit publications with paid staff. There are also good posters on X (although that is not the norm given the format). Similarly, that something is published on a small website or decentralized, algorithm-free social media does not make it humane (as in by human beings for other human beings), much less interesting.
While Substack would not be my first choice for hosting a blog given the preferences I set forth above, I follow a number of Substack blogs with my feed reader. I also follow some WordPress.com blogs and websites and a significant number of for-profit publications, thus explaining the examples I use. There are a good number of genuine “indie” sites in my collection, but there have also been many cases when I came across a good article on a small web or indie web site (like this one), checked the full site archive, and decided that it was not for me. From the perspective of a reader, I care much more about whether a blog or website publishes articles and posts that are pleasant or useful to me than the platform and hosting solution it employs.
Choosing a Tech, Hosting, Platforms and Services, or the Like
WordPress remains the dominant software and platform (noting the “platform” uses the software but is distinct from it) on the web. For that reason, there is no shortage of blog posts and articles about using, choosing, leaving, and returning to WordPress. Unlike many WordPress wielders or antagonists, I do not have a strong opinion on whether someone should or should not use WordPress. It just depends. If you do not believe me, believe Arnold at Shipped & Unfinished, who wrote a post titled Why I Won’t Build Your Website in WordPress (And What I Recommend Instead), where he listed reasons to avoid WordPress for business websites but noted that, caveats and all, “WordPress is still the right choice for some projects.”
Because WordPress is popular (I leave it to others to decide whether that is more on account of its quality or general inertia), I thought it would be instructive to share two articles, one about leaving WordPress and another about returning home.
First, I share Marcin Juszkiewicz’s 2019 article, Good bye WordPress:
WordPress is nice platform but I got tired of it. More and more plugins and themes became demo versions of commercial products. Also amount of JavaScript and CSS added to website made it harder and harder to maintain. At some point I said myself that it is enough. And started looking for alternatives.
Mr. Juszkiewicz, who works at Red Hat, had been using WordPress since 2005. While he left it with some positive sentiments, he explained that it was time for him to move on due to plugins he relied upon becoming unusable and the changes in WordPress making his site more difficult to maintain. In order to improve his site administration experience, Mr. Juszkiewicz switched to Pelican, which is a static site generator. Six years later, he celebrated his website’s 21st birthday in April 2026. There he wrote:
[I]n 2019, I said “good bye” to WordPress and moved to Pelican, static page generator. It was a good move. It cost me a day or two of handling WP export, cleaning posts, sorting out tags, images etc. It was worth it — I still use Pelican to generate this website.
Suffice it to say, it sounds like Pelican is working well for Mr. Juszkiewicz. But some people go on the opposite journey. Danny van Kooten, who is the lead developer of our local, privacy-friendly page visit counting solution, Koko Analytics, recently published a blog post titled Back on WordPress:
WordPress gives me a place that is clearly for managing content. Not building, not configuring, not upgrading a toolchain. Writing. That matters more to me now than whether the site is statically generated, server-rendered, or deployed from Git.
Mr. Juszkiewicz ran into issues maintaining his WordPress site that he no longer wanted to deal with. In his case, switching to Pelican simplified maintaining and posting to his site. Conversely, Mr. van Kooten found that the static site workflow distracted him from writing and made him less likely to update older articles and posts. In his case, WordPress makes it easier to focus on writing and publishing.
The key point is not whether WordPress or a static site generator is the best option in a vacuum, but instead that site administrators, bloggers, and writers should think about what works best. “Best” should be defined as publishing blog posts, articles, and/or other forms of media online, preferably, albeit not necessarily, on a site the webmaster, blogger, or writer controls in full.
Both Messrs. Jszkiewicz and van Kooten run their sites independently (granting with hosting) instead of using a platform. But using a platform or more ready-made solution does allow for greater focus on writing and publishing without the burdens of site, and in some cases server, administration. For a good example, I share Luke Martell’s post, On Blogging. Mr. Martell uses Mataroa, which is a free and open source minimalist blogging platform, which allows people to start a blog for free or for a very small annual fee with extra features. However, Mr. Martell fancies Mataroa because of its lack of features. For example:
Mataroa’s philosophy is that it’s all about the writing, and anything that distracts from that (eg analytics) is pared down. So there’s only one theme, a very plain one. All you can do is tweak the font slightly. Most other blog sites have multiple themes you can choose from and adapt. Mataroa is not about messing with how it looks. Without that, you are thrown back to just the writing. Although, this point can be overdone. It is possible to spend time carefully crafting a design for your blog site and still write great posts.
Mataroa and Bear Blog (which he discusses in his post) are good minimal options for a hosted blog without the fuss. Of course, many more people gravitate to more commercial solutions such as WordPress.com, Substack, Blogger, Tumblr, and Medium (please do not use Medium the reader experience is terrible). Some of these solutions have been around for a while. While none of those bigger blogging solutions would be my first, second, or third choices, I would not categorically warn people away from them (except Medium and probably Tumblr, but that is an aside). I would instead recommend that people consult Jatan’s 2022 article, Is Substack really bad for the culture of Blogging? When he wrote that post, he used Substack – he has since moved his blogs to Ghost, an open source and self-hostable blog/newsletter platform with a hosted option much like WordPress. He explained that he liked Substack for several reasons, including its custom domain support, export support, exportable mailing lists, RSS support, and its editor.
In my “wise” opinion, the key general points from Jatan’s list are support for custom domains, exports, and RSS (see An Introduction to RSS and Other Feed Formats). I would strongly recommend purchasing a domain to use for one’s main project and choosing a set-up which supports custom domains. Similarly, I would strongly recommend ensuring that it is possible to export and back-up the website. Both of these points make it easier to move from one solution for a blog or website to another, as Jatan demonstrated when he moved his entire publication from Substack to Ghost with all of his “content” intact and the same domain. Regarding the domain point, a custom domain gives a website a stronger identity. I do suspect that thenewleafjournal.com is better for discoverability and branding than something like thenewleafjournal.wordpress.com. Speaking for my own projects, I can download my entire NLJ and ECS sites and move them to a different server (I have done that twice) or even port them to something other than WordPress. Similarly, my newsletter host, Buttondown, allows me to download all of my newsletters and move them elsewhere (do note however that I do not use a custom domain for the newsletter).
I would categorically recommend against using any blogging or website solution that does not allow the blogger to export his or her “content.” This sort of lock-in is of course one of the many problems associated with the big social media platforms.
The Uber Theme and One Case Against Platforms
Building off the previous section, I quote from Dave Rubert’s Don’t let your voice be flattened by the über theme:
Don’t get me wrong– I’d rather have more blogs than no blogs so if that’s your situation don’t mind me and my niche beef. But consider for a moment that I can’t tell you the last Medium post I’ve read because they’re all the same to me.
Before I offer my take, I offer a quote from Drew Austin’s Cold Discovery:
[T]he phrases ‘watching Netflix’ and ‘listening to Spotify,’ as opposed to watching or listening to something specific on them, suggest that these platforms denature their content and assimilate its identity into their own.
These two quotes touch on a related issue, albeit Mr. Rupert’s is broader in a subtle way than Mr. Austin’s.
Mr. Rupert focuses on the flattening effect of platform aesthetics. Blogs on Medium, to use his example, tend to look the same. There is no doubt when someone is reading something on Medium that he or she is on Medium – no doubt in part because the reader experience on Medium is awful (my take). While Medium and other platforms relieve the blogger or writer of having to do much regarding the site design, it has an unfortunate tendency of making any blog Medium blog blend into another Medium blog. This issue is not Medium-specific. Substack blogs tend to look the same. So do blogs on my newsletter service, Buttondown. I can also discern with high confidence when I am reading a blog on Google’s lightly-maintained Blogger.
There are two potential issues with the “Uber theme” with which one’s mileage may vary. The first and most obvious issue is that it takes away one’s ability to be creative in how he or she designs the website, and in some cases may make it difficult to build a digital homestead and create a distinct and cozy experience for visitors. Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, I quote from Mr. Rupert regarding Medium:
If everyone is wearing the same uniform, you all look the same. You are interchangeable. Your voice exists in a crowded space of vanilla platitudes. A recent WIRED article suggested over 40% of the content on Medium is AI generated slop.
If a certain blogger publishes interesting things on Medium but the people who might be most interested in what he or she is writing tend to avoid Medium because they associate it with the sort of bad content one may find on social media, we can see a potential problem. What benefit a platform may give for discoverability, it can take away.
Mr. Austin’s point about “watching Netflix” vs “watching a movie that happens to be on Netlfix” or “listening to Spotify” vs “listening to a song that happens to be on Spotify” is applicable to the uber theme issue. While I read a number of Substack publications, there have been a couple of cases where I dropped a Substack publication from my feed reader because the author wrote too much about Substack. That betrays a point: Substack is a platform and pitches itself as one. I avoid the platform element of Substack by following publications from my feed reader. But other readers who use the app or browse from a Substack account may think in terms of “reading Substack” rather han reading specific articles and newsletters on Substack, much in the way people tend to discuss social media (both centralized and federated). This issue is not localized to platforms like Substack and Medium. I have come across a number of blogs hosted on Bear Blog, which I noted previously is a minimalist and privacy-friendly blogging solution. While there are good reasons to recommend Bear Blog over the bigger platforms, I have noticed that many posts from Bear Blog blogs that come to my attention end up being about using Bear Blog. Between that and the basic Bear Blog aesthetic, I will confess that I tend to associate Bear Blog blogs with Bear Blog the platform.
The “Uber theme” also applies—almost paradoxically—to some software and platforms that do not have an “Uber theme.” Bear Blog is themeable and I have seen some aesthetic Bear Blog designs that do enough that my first thought upon seeing them is not “this is a Bear Blog blog,” but the majority of blogs on Bear Blog are distinctly “Bear Blog” in their aesthetics (which are generally the same aesthetics as Mataroa, which came up earlier in this article). Ghost is open source and themeable, but I seldom have difficulty discerning when I am reading something on a Ghost-powered blog or newsletter. Neocities, which is a free and open source web host for static sites, with an emphasis on the hand-crafted websites of early-to-mid 2000s lore, has a great variety of designs. But most of the designs scream Neocities, and I am inclined to agree with Matthew Morgan that my expectations when I see a Neocities-hosted blog are not great (I have found some good Neocities sites, however – so that is not a categorical rule).
WordPress is remarkably flexible, but many WordPress-powered sites, especially those that use the “official” themes, give off a distinct air of WordPress-ness.
In the end, I agree with Mr. Rupert that if the choice is between publishing an interesting blog or website on an “Uber theme” platform or not publishing at all, one should go with the Uber theme (so long as it offers an RSS/ATOM feed). I submit the foregoing as something to consider rather than a rule (there is no reason to choose Medium, however).
Purposeful Conclusion
The main purpose of having a blog or writing website should be to publish on the internet. The tech stack, services, and/or platforms should come second to what we can colloquially call the content. As a proponent of maintaining a digital home, inviting visitors as guests, and replacing social media with a web of personal websites, I would strongly encourage people to build their own sites (either by hand or with something like WordPress) and to put them online without relying on a centralized platform. I will also suggest that Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online accrue most to those who take full ownership of their websites and online presences. But we need not confuse means and ends, especially for someone getting started or someone who has limited time to devote to writing, much less the under-the-hood issues.
So long as a site is publicly available, has RSS/ATOM feeds (or at least allows for end-arounds), and has writing worth reading and media worth viewing, I am open to reading and following. Given the general quality, or lack thereof, of endless stream of content online today, which is unlikely to be improved by recent technological developments, I am inclined to suggest reducing barriers for people who have the ability and willingness to publish pleasant and useful things online.
