I'm Migrating Blog Platforms
Well sort of
Lot of you may be wondering why i’ve not been writing, well life happened. Last time I published anything on the blog I wasn’t even married, now I am happily doing so. I did do lot of writing between my last post on site optimization and this, I just didn’t proofread or well enough to publish it, they say perfect is the enemy of good. Few things concerned my writing and sharing.
Reach was minimal writing on my own compiled blog. Its difficult to get articles from self hosted sites to get trending unless you’re a more ‘well googled’ individual on the web. The RSS feeds were the thing that kept blogging alive for a long time but now those aggregators are going away. There are few just around. Most of my reach came through Social Media, which I didn’t actually like. There was a clear need to diversify. An uphill battle.
There was no way for me to maintain mailing lists People can’t reach out to me through the blog and I couldn’t reach out to them. This was a clear gridlock. I could put up a form and collect mail, but there are issues relating to GDPR and data storage. I don’t want to end up in a legal issue. Data handling is a fulltime job on it own.
Its near impossible for me to track viewership Since I hardly use tracking on the site, except for a very minimal google analytics. That doesn’t involve a super cookie that follow you around. Needed to find a halfway solution that aligns with my personal values.
Near impossible to implement comment system With the current set up i’ve got its near impossible to do any form of comment system, I’d like to hear from you. Yes You! Either I invest in a more dedicated AWS / GCP system and host everything there and risk scope creep and bloating. This defeats the primary purpose of the blog - keep it simple stupid.
My Halfway Solution
I’ll be parallel publishing to two platforms, my own and SubStack. Including this article. I might even migrate my old ones to that. It fulfills lot of my requirements I’ve mentioned above. While it has a paid route, this blog was more of a hobby writing for me. I initially thought of writing on medium but now they force users to sign up. However with that said, I can continue to improve the site while not panicking about the articles not displaying correctly.
You can checkout my Page here at SubStack where you can easily follow. Else you can keep visiting me at lakith.me