Greener Grass With WordPress

With a sense of relief, I recently aborted my daunting blog migration process. Since it was hand-coding, the time and effort required was impractical for me. Besides, leaving WordPress would mean losing several benefits. So while some grass was greener elsewhere, I’m going to water the grass where I’m already standing; it will grow greener.

I’ve invested a lot into WordPress.com over the past 7 years; abandoning it would be a hard pill to swallow. Overall, it’s still one of the best places to blog at. It has several benefits that I like, which would have been diminished or totally lost had I migrated away.

Being a large, established (and admittedly complex) content management system, there are quite a few technical features that WordPress has that are not found on Neocities, the host I was aiming for. Most I could live without, but I’m glad to keep them since settling here. For example: the mobile app, tags, stats, post-types, post scheduling, built-in RSS, ActivityPub federation, and auto cross-posting to social media. While these are not necessities, I like the niceties.

There were, however, major platform benefits I did not want to loose:

• Comments
• Subscribers
• Readers

Comments

I initially managed to set up Disqus comments on my HTML site; it worked well. But after unrelated tinkering months later, all the Disqus comments disappeared - the whole system. Yet the script was untouched. I did not feel like troubleshooting or managing this. So I decided to delete it and, instead, use “Reply by email” or social mention options. It wasn’t ideal, but tolerable.

Then again, I don’t think I would get near as many comments via email as I do now by staying with WordPress’s built-in native comment system, which always works and needs no oversight from me.

More important than the comment system on WordPress.com, though, are the comments themselves. I have hundreds of posts with tons of comments from over the years - I’d lose them all if I left, not taking them with my posts. I don’t want to just throw away valuable conversations I’ve had with others who took time to read and reply to my posts.

Subscribers

WordPress has a built-in subscriber feature, allowing readers to receive my new posts by email. That’s a nice convenience, is platform native, and it just works. Folks who have subscribed would no longer get my posts that way. And while I could start a new subscriber list using a third-party like MailChimp, I didn’t want to manage that and pay an extra fee either. Sticking with WordPress means I can continue enjoying this feature, and my readers don’t need to change anything or miss out.

Readers

The WordPress Reader is a good feed system of posts and blogs to follow. I even appreciate the suggested posts to discover new bloggers. The Reader also makes liking and commenting super easy. Altogether, it creates a little blogosphere right on WordPress. And if I’m not mistaken, the Reader uses tags that you add to your posts to aid in discovery - you can follow tags, not just blogs. This helps me find new bloggers and likewise be found by new readers.

Community

These three - Comments, Subscribes, Readers - share a common trait. They’re all about people. It’s the community, the audience, my readers, fellow bloggers in the blogosphere. I don’t want to let them go, which is what would happen if I go away to another blog host. Sure, I’d still be on the open web, but I’d be distanced from the WordPress community where I’ve built up something of a presence over the years.

Final thoughts

There are several other blogging platforms that look good. I’ve tried a few but end up back at WordPress. Instead of eyeing the greener grass elsewhere, I’m watering the ground here, making the grass greener where I’m already at. Barring crazy earthquakes or sinkholes, I think I’ll stay deeply rooted in WordPress.