My return to blogging
After a long hiatus from blogging, I decided I was ready to come back top it again. I had a successful, small YouTube channel that made some extremely decent side hustle money but I was burnt out. Deep down I knew my happy place was writing, not shooting videos. So here I am.
This time I wanted to blog without the agenda of monetizing anything. In the past, I blogged to make money. I went the route most money bloggers go. AI written posts, running them through SEO optimization tools and doing just about whatever I could to get organic search engine traffic.
I knew I wasn't really adding anything to the web. I was at least ethical enough to start blogs on topics I actually knew about, so I did edit AI written posts for accuracy and added my own perspective during editing, but something about it still didn't feel right. Does the internet really need another blog post about "Best mountain bike saddle" or "Do mountain bike riders use clipless pedals?"
I also knew I didn't want to get bogged down in an overly bloated blogging platform like Wordpress. I definitely didn't want a highly commercial CMS like Squarespace or Wix for a simple blog. I might have gone back to Ghost, but their hosted version has doubled in price, plus I didn't care about harvesting reader emails for a paid newsletter.
In the past I'd used a static site generator called Publii and hosted my site for free on Netlify. I'm not a super technical person, but it was still not that hard to set up. Even Publii wasn't minimalist enough for me. I just wanted something new.
In the end I settled on two choices - Mataroa and Bear blog. While Mataroa is about as minimal as you can get, I chose Bear because the price was right, it had built-in basic analytics and first and foremost, it had a big community of independent bloggers.
So this is my new home for the time being and I don't see myself going anywhere else. I like the vibe here. It makes me want to write. I like the idea of doing a blog the right way. Just like the old days when blogging wasn't so commercial and a little more personal. Until next time, take care...