An experiment...

Jason Kratz

• 2 min read

or... I've set up a new blog for the 7,836th time.

This post post probably should have come first but as you'll see below I'm settling for good...

I see people say all the time "I just write for myself. I don't care if anyone else reads it". I call bullshit on that (at least for 99% of the people who say it). Everyone has something to say, why would you not want someone to read it, especially when it takes non-zero effort to get words out into the world?

My own blogging experience has been fits and starts and the inevitable collapse when it gets too hard. As I said, non-zero effort. It's part of the beauty of Manton Reece's micro.blog where one of the main goals is to reduce friction to writing by having short, social-media like posts be one of the features.

In the past I've floated around WordPress.com (ridiculous pricing and crappy themes), Blot.im (really low friction writing and crappy themes), and micro.blog (pretty damn good but has an owner with no plan for updates other than what he feels like doing) chasing the perfect which of course is setting myself up for failure because none of them are perfect. micro.blog is really good, and the community there is wonderful, but for some reason it doesn't click with me.[1]

So here I am now over at Ghost Pro with experiment 7,836 in blogging. Couple of reasons for Ghost Pro:

  1. Nice default themes with header images.
  2. Newsletters because yes I really would like someone to read this stuff.
  3. Yes I can really format permalinks the way I want.

And the really experimental part? I'm going to try to just work on this slowly, over time, and accept that it will never be perfect. I'm a recovering perfectionist and they say perfection is the enemy of the good. I read far too much about the "right way" of doing this stuff.

The truth is there is no right way. This site is for fun, and to learn, and it can be whatever I want it to be. It doesn't need to conform to someone else's idea of what a blog is. So if I want to put emoji in titles I will. To riff on the Rifleman's Creed from the US Marines:

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

So we'll see. I'm really hoping this one succeeds where others have failed. Slow, and steady, and good. The hell with the perfect.

  1. Well, not "some reason". It's what I said before and not being able to format permalinks the way I want. Yes I'm that anal. If I have control over so much other stuff why can't I control that as well? ↩︎