I consider myself a wanderer. In high school, I seemed to fit in with all the different social groups and thereby belonging to none of them; online, I wander from social network to social network, trying to find one that suits me perfectly. For a long time, I thought Tumblr was my home to stay. I love Tumblr, with its eccentricities, networking, silly gifs and fan wars. But it’s not a place where I truly feel at home any longer. A month or two ago, I discovered that .ee domains existed. After much thought and consideration, Mitch and I decided to purchase gabriellew.ee. It’s a bit pricier than buying a .com domain, but it’s definitely a domain worth keeping, at least for myself. Since then, I’ve searched and searched for a blogging platform that I could use on gabriellew.ee.
Here were my requirements:
- As minimal and bare as possible. I don’t need a lot of gimmicks and showiness, just something that allows me to publish text and photo posts.
- Not too much back-end coding required. I freely admit that I am not an engineer. I have little to no capacity for back-end development and my primary strengths, as far as code goes, lies in markup and some simple PHP. I wanted something user-friendly, with a front-end publisher (forgive me for not knowing the correct term) and no Terminal commands. That ruled out most static blog generators.
- Relatively easy to theme. Pretty self-explanatory, yes?
- Commenting system. After many mishaps with Tumblr and Disqus, I did not want to have to deal with third-party commenting systems. I dislike the inflexibility of Disqus.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t found what I wanted. For now, gabriellew.ee is powered by Wordpress. I love Wordpress, but I feel almost bloated by its code and frankly, I don’t need half the features it provides. We’ll see how this goes. If not, I suppose I’ll just have to go wandering again, in search of something better.