Over the course of the last two and a half decades, I have started and abandoned countless blogs on various platforms. The early ones were mostly self-made, but then along came WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc and I jumped on each of those bandwagons because, well, I guess I’m awfully curious about how well they work and what they can do for me.
Eventually, I settled on self-hosted WordPress for my platform of choice, even if I continuously question it. WordPress is straightforward to set up and the number of custom themes I have made over the years means I am familiar with their theming API. Both of those factors make it easy for me to randomly set up new blogs on a whim. I just have to buy a domain, set up a new WordPress instance on my server, copy one of my existing themes, make a few tweaks, and finally bring it all together on the sever. After that, my new blog is ready to go. It only takes about a couple of hours depending on how many tweaks I make to the new theme.
My current count is five blogs. You’ve found one of them here, but you can see the others here. When creating new blogs, I tend to think in terms of subject matter. History Rhymes is where I (rarely) post about history, The Beskirted Man is where I post about gender and gender-non-conformity, Haunting Alex is where I post about ghost stories, vampires and other horror topics, Alex’ Notizbuch is where I post about a mix of topics in German, and this blog is largely about technical subjects, although it actually ends up being a bit of a mix of my interests that don’t fit into any of the other blogs. I consider it to be my primary blog.
I tend to separate them based on subject matter because people who are interested in history aren’t necessarily interested in gender or programming and it makes it easier for them to follow only what they are interested in. However, keeping the separation is a lot more work for me behind the scenes.
Since they are different WordPress instances with different themes, I have to keep them, their plugins and the themes up to date. For that, I have a bash script that runs via a cronjob on my server that uses the WordPress CLI which I’ve installed on my server to help me manage all of the blogs. It works, but it’s still something I need to maintain.
Generally, WordPress is extremely good at backwards compatibility, but updates do nevertheless still occasionally break things in my custom themes which means I have to first find the issue(s), then fix it in each of my custom themes since they generally share a similar code base. Every one of my blogs has a custom theme because I love the process of designing and am very picky about how my websites look.
In reality, it isn’t a lot of work and, since the updates are automated, I don’t have to worry about that aspect very much. However, it does still take away time I could use for writing posts which is why I sometimes dream of combining all of my blogs into one. Also, then I wouldn’t haven’t to constantly point people to multiple different websites for them to see everything I write.
There have certainly been instances of me importing other blogs into this one before. When I shut down a blog, I want to keep the posts I wrote and so I add them to this blog. That happened with old blogs like Feed The Dev and Systemberg. I also just got through importing a ton of posts from old blogs of mine hosted on WordPress.com in an effort to conserve the posts and make them more accessible for everyone since I haven’t posted on any of those old blogs in nearly twenty years.
In any case, there really wasn’t much of a point to this post other than being a thought-dump about my blog situation. Perhaps one day I will combine all of my English blogs into this one so I only have to maintain two blogs: one for English and one for German. Or, maybe I’ll just keep them all separate. Only time will tell.
