On Hosting a Blog

I’ve had a (rarely-updated) development blog at abstractrose.net for about a year now. It runs on a self-hosted Wordpress installation over at NearlyFreeSpeech and pulls images from Amazon Web Services. Thanks to the maturity of the Wordpress codebase, managing it has been a snap. But the stress of learning about security, finding the right plugins, dealing with spam, worrying about SEO, and other fiddly factors is still significant. And even though NearlyFreeSpeech hosts their own Apache, PHP, and MySQL services, it still took a couple of full days to get everything up and running. (Guilty: I’m a web development newbie.)

So for my personal blog, I’ve decided to try out Squarespace. They seem to sponsor all my favorite tech podcasts, and at only 8 bucks a month, they’re only slightly more expensive than my current NearlyFreeSpeech/AWS costs. I intend to eventually move the whole thing over to another Wordpress install, but for now, I think the easy solution is the best one. I don’t have time to fiddle — I just want to write something!

 (Incidentally, this means that I’ll be moving most of my programming and sysadmin talk over to the Programming category here. The Abstract Rose blog will be devoted solely to game development.)