I Almost Did Not Do This
I almost did not post this site. I decided to take down my old website, and it took me a whole year to decide on what to do with my website or personal domain.
When I was a working single person, my personal domain was about my work. I had my resume, my portfolio, and a few posts. It was cool to be Google-able. It made a lot of sense to do a little self-promotion and use it to practice Wordpress and independent publishing.
Then I became a mom and left my career to be mom of 3 very rambunctious children. I freelanced, never to step into another corporate office.
The web grew a lot since Web1.0. Now we have many tools to choose from.
Then, having done a lot of Wordpress development and built on various platforms, I start to rethink about how I want my own personal domain to be more about my own personal platform. I started to see social media differently. Maybe it was the kids, but parental control became a full time job. On top of my mom duties were the technology management issues that came with running a household.
I started to experiment with different ideas for my personal website. I wanted to try to move off Wordpress and branch out. Frankly, I was a bit weary of the Automattic drama, a bit tired of the Wordpress way of websites, all the cybersecurity issues, and the time and effort of maintenance.
I considered Substack, but really that is just another form of social media. Social media is a tool, and one that is always changing outside of my own personal control. Just today I found out there is even more controversy with the Substack unicorn, and I prefer a stable platform that I have more control over.
Now I am posting my personal website on Ghost, but I still have my Wordpress hosting for other domains. Wordpress is still the platform that powers the majority of the internet. I had it set up on Pikapods at first, but then decided to pay Ghost Pro for at least the first year and give it a good run. Even though Ghost has only 0.1% of the CMS market share compared to Wordpress, it is gaining a lot of momentum among the independent media with high traffic.
Source: https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cm-ghost
Several benefits to Ghost: speed, simplicity, security, open-source managed by a nonprofit.
Most of all, I wanted simplicity in maintenance for my own personal domain.
