.. let’s go shopping? Not quite, but there actually is some truth to it.
When I first started blogging, I got my start – the Home Of The Rant – on livejournal. First on the free edition, and then, when I needed more features, on the paid edition. And writing is indeed rather addictive, so I staid with it.
Well, I staid with blogging. Somehow, livejournal was not quite what I was looking for. So I floundered about, tried out quite a few blogging systems, and even wrote my own. The latter one? Total suckers’ bet. Yes, you learn about web development – but for me, it takes time away from what I really want to do, write.
So I moved on to WordPress, and my own webhost, hosting ‘Groby Unplugged’ – this site.
More shopping. I tried both Virtual Private Servers and shared hosting and in the end stuck with shared. Not because it’s technologically better, but because it’s less headache. That might change if I ever get popular enough that performance matters – but for now, it’s doing fine. (In case you’re interested, I’m with Dreamhost. If you sign with and use my affiliate link or mention the code GROBY you get $50 of your bill. And I get $47 – which I much appreciate!)
You’d think now I’d be settled and could just get blogging, right? Well, sort-of. The more time you spend on this, the more you realize what you could do if you just spent some time – or money. There are tons of plugins to explore (free). There’s certainly the lure of professionally made themes. (Not free. Not by a long shot. Bring money!). And you do spend a lot of time on just keeping your blog software up-to-date. I love wordpress – but if they could have a few less security holes so I don’t need to update every 30 seconds, that’d be fine by me.
And of course, sooner or later you’ll discover that your writing spans to many fields of interest, or at least I did. So, at some point, I took my programming topics off to a new blog – codingadventures.com. And all was good – for a while.
Then I transitioned, and started rachelblum.com. And I felt programming for the web and game programming were different enough that they justified two blogs – so there’s Rachel’s Lab Notes for the game programming topics now.
And there were, of course, several – aborted – home-written blog projects in between. Drupal, Django, you name it. I probably tried it. And always realized that I’d rather write than re-invent blogs.
But now that all that is done, I finally can write, right?
Well, sort-of. Turns out writing isn’t always easy, either. You need topics – and I refuse to just bang out another top-10 list if I can’t think of anything good. Often, the editor gets just closed again.
But when it doesn’t, it has been worth the whole journey for me.