My heroes are those people who stick with something: a project, a game, or — keeping it topical — the design of their website.

I have operated a few websites in my life, public, personal, and professional, so I’ve been around the block more than a few times when it comes to features and designs. When I worked for a professional website management outfit, all I did was create sites that managed content (which is all websites do, really, in some form or another). That’s why this site is running on the standard off-the-shelf WordPress, and has for years. I got tired of having to maintain every single aspect of a site from design to function, and since WordPress is/was the de facto standard for power-blogging and was easy to set up with a paid host, I originally chose it and enjoyed working with it a lot, mainly because I never had to actually code anything.

Now, though, the pendulum is on the back-swing and I’m considering writing a custom blog application. I don’t use a lot of what WordPress has to offer; I’m the only one writing here so I don’t need user management and a lot of the plugins seem to lean towards “SEO” which is fine for actual businesses or those who really want to extend their reach, but I only care about word of mouth. I’m finding it less useful as a platform which is entirely a “me problem” because I can’t not get interested in all of the ancillary options that are made available to me, no matter what we’re talking about.

And to be frank, I’m kind of thinking about streamlining my presentation. I don’t need all of the graphics or “fancy business” that comes with the theme I’m currently using. While I could switch to a simpler theme, I’m the kind of person who will take the mile when given the inch: since I had an involved theme available, I gravitated towards it and would continue to do so unless I couldn’t. A custom site would remove the temptation to “tart up” the site in the future because to do so I would have to design and execute the tarting.

I’ve just installed Ghost to my home server in case that’s something I might consider, but I don’t think that platform is going to work for me. It seems pretty straightforward in both operation and presentation, but it also seems very much to want people to throw their contact info into the pot to receive posts “by email”, which is not something I have any interest in doing. I’m not here to “build a brand” or to show up everywhere people do not want me to be. I’ve long since moved from worrying about stats to just writing what I want, as much or as little as I want and as a result have found blogging peace of mind. This is apparently incongruous with how blogging platforms think about the reasons and the act of blogging.

I don’t know what I want to do, really. I’ve been working on my custom server here, so I can use that as a bridge between the back-end data store and a front-end presentation. I’m running this site from my home, so I could create a multi-package or multi-container setup using the things I’m already running (Redis, whatever Database I want, various web server images, and so on). The only “hard part” would be going back into the content management application mines, although without having to worry about registering and tracking users and such it might not be as bad as I remember it being.