Setting up a not-for-free-blog as a web dummy
I've embarked on shifting away from using free software and services and towards paying companies for delivering an ad free life and not too complicated tools. For e-mail, searching and surfing, this was not difficult. It'll take a long time to change all my accounts to a different mail address, though. But then I tried to do the same for starting a blog and I've been struggling for days, increasingly realizing that I lacked basic knowledge. So. This is what I found out. It's like finding/building a place to live. You need 1. A domain name (the shield with the name of your house) 2. A host (who rents you a plot of of land) or your own server (buy a plot of land) 3. A blogging tool or platform (tools with which you build your actual home) It got complicated with all the terminology. A generic term for a blogging tool is a Content Management System (CMS). It started with a post on Tedium calling for independent blogging and then I got lost posts discussing CMS versus blogging platforms, or website builders and something called the fediverse. Also, companies that offer a blogging tool or platform (still not 100% clear on the difference) may also offer hosting (like this one) or even a domain name. If they offer hosting, it seems you can sometimes choose to host elsewhere and sometimes not. Following my analogy, some of them rent out fully furnished apartments. You can pay for it or even live for free if you don't mind the advertisements in your windows and them walking into your living room to see what you are up to. Some of them are specialized, aiming for customers who want to build smaller of bigger shops or offices. Those tend to require technical skills like CSS and HTML. Or something called 'familiarity with the codeline' (or was it linecode?), which reminds me of a distant past where you could type-copy lines of Basic and get a balloon made up of zeros on your monochrome screen. It's difficult to find out where a certain company fits in this whole spectrum of options. I realized want a tiny house on wheels. I have modest needs but need to be able to move it somewhere else if need be. I want it ad free and as private as I choose. I'd like to post pictures and text and would love to be able to assign tags to posts or cleverly search my blog. I'll pay for it and don't mind some DIY, as long as I don't need to be fully fledged architect/programmer before I can publish something. Portability means asking the following questions: - Can I export my blog? - For free? - How does that work? What type of files are involved? (I still have to read up on this) - What happens to my content when your company should fail? Writing this helped clear my mind! Now on to thinking about a domain name, deciding whether to write in Dutch or Dutch and English (for wider community) and trying just write.as or also micro.blog. bye!