Some of you may have noticed that I change blog platforms regularly, I love all the new ideas and how different blog providers have slightly different approaches. It allows us bloggers to find the tool that suits. Or that should be the idea, some of us move platforms regularly, often returning to one we have used before. Let’s be honest, we like to tinker with stuff.
A recent change may have put a stop to my tinkering. Due to some email faff with my previous web/email hosting I decided to move to another provider. Looking round, I spotted Zume, decent specs, decent price, and importantly LiteSpeed Enterprise for caching with QUIC.cloud CDN. Could this solve one of my WordPress bugbears? Yes it did!
The platform
Yep, back to WordPress. Never had a real problem with it, apart from speed. I know it well, and it can be installed directly onto the Zume hosting so not paying a subscription for someone else to host the blog. The integration of Litespeed and QUIC.cloud means an average TTFB of 102ms worldwide. I’m more than happy with that.
The design
I wanted a simple theme, something I could tweak but came with a good baseline out of the box. This is the Kanso theme by Rich Tabor, simple and fast. I tweaked a few layouts and kept the layout simple. Limited imagery, logos and icons help focus the eyes on the text.
A simple menu takes you where you need to go, I did have a ‘now’ page, but ditched it as it seemed a burden to keep up to date.
Font wise, I really love the Charter font. Easy to read, even on a mobile. It isn’t used too much so gives a bit of a different appearance amongst the other blogs. I got the idea to use Charter from Modern Font Stacks, worth a look for some inspiration. The CSS I added to the additional CSS section in WordPress is below.
body {font-family: Charter, 'Bitstream Charter', 'Sitka Text', Cambria, serif;}The things I am trying
A key advantage of WordPress is the amount of developers putting out plugins. I am trying the ActivityPub plugin to see how it integrates to my blogging. If it works, you should see when someone likes or quotes my post ( usually from Mastodon) and if they reply to the post it appears as a comment. I can also reply to this through the comments section inside WordPress.
It’s early days, I can’t post to everyone directly – or at least I can’t make that work. But the potential is there so happy to stick with it.
What next?
What does someone who loves to tinker do when they have finished tinkering? A good question – I am not too sure. Hoping this will inspire me into a regular blogging habit. I’ve got so much from other blogs over the years that I’d like to contribute more to the community. Hoping I don’t get distracted by a new platform – I’m looking at you pure blog!
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