I have made many attempts to create any type of blog. I started my website journey with WordPress.com in 2014, later moving to the open-source WordPress installations, spending hours customising themes, plugins, pages and posts. Until I was introduced to the world of hosting my own websites, first from an eBook from my local library on PHP and then with Node.js via Glitch.com when I started creating my websites with Express. It's been a great journey, but I have always wanted to create a proper blog.

It's a great benefit of WordPress - it's all there in one place... no development, etc. But WordPress is full of features that I don't need for every site, not even my main personal site. It's much more lightweight to make custom stuff and host it with an Express server as opposed to spinning up a new WordPress instance for each site. That probably says something about me creating a plethora of websites, though!

I have tried hosting Ghost for a few blogs. It generally works quite well. However, I must admit that the UI seems a little cluttered, confusing, stressful. Though they have gone for a clean look. I have now also had a few problems with the hosting side that have broken me.

So, here I am. On a new platform. Mataroa! I originally found it when following a link to a blog post from Mastodon. It was an interesting post about how the writer saved a great amount of money for a company. Mataroa describes itself as a minimalist blogging platform, and that it is. It also has an API which means I can grab the posts and do cool stuff, like having a list of posts on my home page. It's also very affordable - free or $9 if you wish to support the service. I have just paid my first annual fee to support. It's just simple and I have come to find after using my fair share of clean, yet cluttered UI, I have found that is what I like.

Music I listened to while writing this post (was using Spotify DJ so it's a bit all over the place, but I guess it kind a shows a bit of my varying taste):