So I'm dealing with my tendency for blog proliferation again. I thought about starting two new semi-private or private blogs.
1. A themed blog for practicing my fiction writing skills or world building or both. I don't want to syndicate this one anywhere. I'm not sure about blocking search engine crawlers probably yes. If I make it open to anyone who stumbles upon it I would want comments on.
2. I thought about a blog that is just for musings and notes mainly my thoughts/plans for my other online websites. I'd at least start with this as private.
Neither one of these are going to ever become popular so they both could be hosted on a subdomain somewhere.
The age old problem is it's easy to start a blog but can you sustain it? Will I spread myself too thin?
When I get this itch, my solution is to procrastinate like I pro. Doing a self-hosted Wordpress install seems like way overkill so I started researching blogging hosts, feature sets, costs. Also trying to figure out if both should be on the same host or split up.
Conclusions
After looking at about 100 blog platforms *pounds head against wall* the sad truth is Blogger.com has just about everything I want and need for at least one of these blogs. But I don't like or trust Google, Blogger's owner, because I think they are dangerous.
Wordpress.com would have been my first choice but they now have a new block editor which I don't want. For these projects I just want to write, I don't want to have to fight the editor.
Micro.blog has two major hurdles for me: 1. I'm not on an Apple device, so long form writing is either with their web UI or nothing. I'm experimenting with Quill so that may be a partial work around. 2. No public comment capability on posts. That's a problem for me. Micro.blog has added some great features over the years but these two remain sticking points. I also like the community but these blogs are loners, not intended to be part of a community.
Write.as looks good but I still have not confirmed if they have comments on their Pro hosting plan.
Bear Blog - has potential but is not quite there feature-wise.
Mataroa Blog - is close. No pages feature though. I give them an award for having the best no nonsense feature list right on their front page. Other blog hosts ought to take note.
I'm hoping that if I procrastinate long enough maybe this urge to start new blogs will just go away. It's worked before, but not always.
