I’ve been on a bit of a quest lately to find a means of blogging in a way that I like, and a place to shout into the void so I can stay off social media. Squarespace’s blog engine was meh, despite a few handy features like photo galleries, which I utilized on the CD4k post.

I thought I was set to go all-in on Ghost, and even did so with the SaberComp website. I even paid for a couple themes but things didn’t quite click with what I was aiming for. I like the idea of keeping things a little on the nerdy side, but I also like the idea of being able to compose and publish from a desktop app, so I was pondering Markdown. I love RSS and was intrigued by the thought of newsletters.

Ulysses does support publishing to Ghost. But while I was still poking around trying to shoehorn my content into someone else’s platform/theme design, I got sidetracked by Claude Code. As an experiment, I had it rebuild the BadCow website, just to see what could be done with prompting. I told it to recommend me a stack that would allow for controlling content with Markdown so I could version-control it, and it suggested Astro.

Seeing Astro in action through Claude, and eventually taking the reigns from it and setting up a nice little dev environment within Nova, I quite liked the idea of building something completely from scratch, but I’d like to do so myself rather than, you know, vibing it. So I have an on-going project/conversation whereby Claude Code is acting as my tutor for setting up and deploying an Astro site from scratch, with vanilla CSS and everything… My hope is that will result in a fun personal website that’ll be tailored to my needs.

Which brings me around to where we are now. Part of my drive to get my personal site built up into something by which I can more readily post my thoughts, is my desire to throw off the chains of social media and just have a home-base whereby people can come and see whatever I’ve been up to. I’d like to get in a better habit of talking about stuff I’m doing, and I’d like people who actually care about stuff I do to have a place where they can always get the latest updates.

Thanks to John Gruber sharing this wonderful piece (The Last Quiet Thing) by Terry Godier, I ended up discovering both Terry’s awesome RSS app Current, and subscribing to his feed. I also read The 49 MB Webpage by Shubham Bose, which really spoke to my guiding philosophy behind the stuff I’d like to build on the web; in short: don’t build shit.

I noticed Terry recently fired up a Micro.blog, so I went spelunking. And I might have found the right balance of nerdiness and polish I was looking for. There are numerous ways to shove content into it, and I was able to import my like, 7 blog posts from Squarespace. Plus it was super simple to just point a subdomain at it so I don’t have to nuke my Squarespace site yet.

Even now, I’m composing this in Ulysses on my MacBook Neo (squee!). I have a Micro.blog iPhone app that I can use to fire off Short Moos if I wish. Plus it has integration with the Fediverse built in, and I can automatically publish my posts to Threads and Bluesky, despite not having to actually spend time on those apps.

Talk about a win-win. In the spirit of not letting perfection be the enemy of good, I’m gonna roll with this and see how it goes. I’m sure I’ll be playing with the themes like crazy and I wouldn’t be surprised if I eventually go down the rabbit hole of building my own. No promises though.