I did 100 days and it was a good amount of time to figure out a bunch of things I shouldn’t do. I still want to nail down what I should be doing. I want to write. I want to improve as a writer. That means sharing some work. Maybe not all the crappy pages. Just some of them. We’ll see.
Anyway for the first 100 days I used Google Docs and Jekyll. I was familiar with Jekyll. I love using it for putting sites with some structure together. I saw that it could handle hundreds of posts. Paul Stamatiou has a Jekyll blog with thousands of posts. Ten years worth.
Now he writes great, very (very) in-depth posts every couple months. I think Jekyll is great for that. I also think it’s great for a custom photo blog like he has.
Jekyll sometimes made me feel more like Mr. Hyde. I would just want to post something then a couple of hours of HTML and CSS later…
So I installed WordPress. Something I realized about a lot of people I’m looking at whose path seems to make sense as a writer—they aren’t using Jekyll. Even Paul’s thousands of posts were converted from WordPress posts.
I want to write shorter pieces more frequently. (Taken to that extreme you’ve got Twitter.) Docs and Jekyll allowed me to separate writing from the code. But not always the publishing part. I’d need to finish things in Markdown. It’s too close to code. Keep me in a rich text editor.
I want to be able to go through the entire thing on my phone. (Without setting up a bunch of scripts.) Everyone likes the feeling of completing a post. I’ve had WordPress blogs in the past and there’s something to hitting “Post”. It’s more satisfying than running a deploy script.
While I was a little too optimistic thinking I’d avoid tinkering (trading Ruby for PHP and MySQL—all of which I know next to nothing about).
So here it is. Just another WordPress site. Hello world!