This is my last post …on Wordpress

(This was posted over on my old Wordpress site. I’m leaving it here for those of you stumbling upon new changes…)

After a over a decade of using Wordpress, it’s time to move on… to another platform. I’ll be moving this blog over to Blot in the next couple days.

Why?

Wordpress has changed. It’s gotten more powerful and complex with a frequent need of updating. Its focus seems to be moving away from a pure blogging platform to a jack-of-all-trades fancy page publishing system.

There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s insanely powerful and extensible but I’ve changed too.

Like Benjamin Button, I’m falling backwards into simplicity and ease of use. Hence Blot. It’s stupendously simple — just drop a note into a folder on your computer (or phone) and it magically appears on your blog.

Same with photos - I can snap something live on my phone and see it automatically materialize on the blog. Such beautiful simplicity is a must for a wandering nomad like myself with often limited connectivity.

Blot is also mischievously flexible — I’ve found it easier to bend to my will thanks to its clever templating engine and ability to use custom metadata. That’s how I was able to set up a “Journal of Thoughts” section on the new blog that stitches individual thoughts for the day into a single post while keeping each “thought” inside a tagged folder i.e. [health] (I’ll have more on all that in a future post).

As an added bonus, since Blot reads markdown (and txt & doc) files I’m able to plug my Obsidian app right in so all my notes and posts are linked together in the backend giving me a blog and commonplace book/knowledge management system in one. Whenever I edit or create a file in Obsidian, it can show up on the blog (more on this later, too!).

I’m excited about it and very much looking forward to blogging joyfully again with less friction for a change rather than contorting myself to make things work.

Those of you following via the RSS feed should be able to continue to get updates thanks to a redirect I set up. Down the road though you’ll want to update your feed reader to point to https://alongtheray.com/feed.rss on the new blog.

Unfortunately it’s a different matter for those of you following via Wordpress’ apps, etc. Since the new blog won’t be plugged into the Wordpress ecosystem you’ll no longer get notifications of new posts from there.

If you’d like to keep following me, you can get new posts by email by signing up here (Foment Labs is my self-hosted email platform). I’ll also continue sharing new posts to my Twitter and Fediverse accounts.

I’m very grateful to Wordpress for providing an open and stable platform for so long and wish ’em continued success — we need them. I will continue using Wordpress for my non-personal sites because it’s perfect for that.

If you have any questions, just post a comment. Thank you for following and see you on the Blot side!

-Ray