My first blogging experience was on Xanga. For years I blogged on WordPress for Coming Anarchy. This personal blog started in 2009 on Tumblr before moving it to Octopress a few years ago when I set out to learn Ruby on Rails. These days, I am not as motivated to be dealing with environments, dependencies and generators. It has been getting in the way of producing written pieces.

I set out to find an alternative. I experimented with Ghost, Silvrback, Roon, Scriptogr.am, Postach.io, and even seriously considered Posthaven.

There is something I have noticed about the new generation of blogging platforms. They have taken inspiration from the streams in our lives. By streams, I mean things like Twitter, Facebook’s Newsfeed and the like. Content on these platforms is ephemeral — in the moment. That is a really cool feature, but I don’t think a blog should follow that model.

The new blog platforms do not have satisfactory retrieval systems for older posts. Easy to navigate archives, tag/category clouds, or even embedded search on the site were all missing. I have 5 years worth of 411 posts. Accessibility to the back catalogue is important to me both as a writer and a reader of blogs. When I find a new writer online the first thing I do is check out their categories/tags to see what topics are generally covered. I might do a search for terms related to the post that brought me to the site. None of the new blog platforms have matured to having these features yet. So I decided to choose a mature platform: WordPress.

It offers the most flexibility and convenience, and since I am using the hosted version I think security and traffic will not be a problem. That and one other thing: most of the new blog platforms assume WordPress, and have good migration capabilities. So in a sense, I am future-proofing my content as well.

Most important, the platform will no longer be an obstacle for writing — an activity I am far more passionate about than maintaining dev environments for static site generators.