The only thing sadder than a blog with a single introductory post is a forum site with more than twenty subforums, each with cutesy name and description, and about three posts between them, all by the same guy.

I’ve had this domain for a while, but the usual combination of laziness and overambition stopped me from really doing much with it. There was a little static HTML thingie with some links and writing here at some point a few months ago, but it was boring and sorta ugly so I took it down.

The only web framework I have any amount of experience working with is Ruby on Rails, and using that for a little personal site is comparable to building a mansion in your backyard so you can put each of your socks in its own room.

Wordpress seemed similarly too complex, and if I wanted to dig deeper into customising it it’d involve PHP.

I thought about just using Apache and PHP, but I don’t want to wear out my $ key, and it’s 2014.

I really don’t like the new Blogspot look. It’s too flashy and swishy, to the point where what are supposed to be traditional blogs look like content aggregators unto themselves, missing only .io domains.

Tumblr, actually, is very nice from a blogging platform point of view. It’s really the perfect blend of ease-of-use and customisability, given that any non-technical person can have a functioning tumblog in four clicks and any technical person can have the same and then go and edit their blog’s HTML in whatever way they see fit. The only real downside is that you can’t host a tumblr on your own server.

But then, I’m really not a microblogger. I like walls of text. I’m the kind of guy who will skip a video and look for an article about the same subject. Now, there’s nothing, technically, stopping me or anyone else from making a tumblr with regular text-heavy blog entries and zero reblogged gifsets, but it would be kind of against the spirit of the site, I think.

So at some point I started fiddling around with Node.js (there’s only so many times you can read about “X in Javascript” or “Y.js” on Hacker News before you have to try it out), and I’ve gotta say that was my favourite – you have to write the server and routing systems yourself, but that way you get complete control over your site and likely a better understanding of how it works than with some magic CMS or regular server. It’s a really cool, educational way of making a website, but a fair bit of work.

Eventually (this morning) I settled on just using Ghost, a blogging service built on Node.js. It’s very new, incredibly minimal (there isn’t even a menubar in the default theme) but looks really good and is fairly easy to set up if you’re comfortable with terminal commands. Plus its editor uses Markdown, which unquestionably beats fiddling with WSIWYG or typing out HTML any day. I’m probably going to fiddle around with it as I have the time and inclination (expect at least a menubar and comments at some point, plus the disappearance of those awful share links on the bottom left), or maybe I’ll abandon it and actually roll my own Node.js site for kicks, or maybe one built on COBOL on Cogs.