I’ve wanted to start a blog for a long time. As excited as I am to have an outlet to write for the sake of writing, picking a blogging engine in 2012 has proven to be a surprisingly challenging dilemma. Finding a healthy balance between controlling your work, protecting your security, and not having to be too fiddly is hard. I narrowed the field to 3 main options and spent a little time considering each.
1. Wordpress
Wordpress was at the top of my list because I have the most experience with it, since I’ve had the opportunity to create a few blogging sites for friends. Wordpress is extremely extendable and extremely popular, but those benefits come at a cost. Wordpress has security updates to protect against malicious attackers almost every few weeks. Also, Wordpress has changed significantly in version 3.0 and understanding it and hacking a theme together would take some effort.
2. Tumblr
Tumblr was the second choice, since tumblr reduces the fiddle-factor to basically nothing. Tumblr goes down often, however, and putting my words into a corporate blogging silo isn’t an appealing idea.
3. Squarespace
The final option was Squarespace. I considered this really heavily because Merlin will not shut up about it and my friend Mark used to work there. Squarespace seems like a more healthy balance between options and ease of use, but at the end of the day, I’m still handing my data to another company to store, control, and use.
I decided on Wordpress because I realized that being in control of my data was the most important aspect of this blog. Having a mysql database that I can read, export from, run scripts on might betray my nerdiness, but it does make sure that my writing continues to stay mine. Being able to control the data on the domain is also useful, so I can upload and link any assets I need (code, demos, images, etc).
I’m looking forward to covering some pretty eclectic topics: I’ve got some posts about photography in mind, I’m sure I’ll talk a little about politics, but mostly I want to write about programming. I’ve got a really cool post coming on custom animations in iOS, which I’m excited about. After I’m done posting about all the weird things interest me, I expect to have exactly zero regular readers.
