For the last few months, I debated switching my site to a headless CMS using WordPress. I liked—nay, loved—how easy it was to open a browser window, type words, add images, and make a new post. It was much simpler than pushing to GitHub, dealing with front matter, and all those things.

As I was working on the api calls, I thought, “Why not just move my *entire* site to WordPress?” I reasoned that it would be nice to make pages with the same ease I made posts with, I could reasonably rely on WordPress being around for a bit, I was already hosting the site, and I found a [theme](https://andersnoren.se/teman/mcluhan-wordpress-theme/) that was minimal and elegant.

I thought about that idea for a weekend, but decided against it. Although the theme was really nice, and making new pages was easy, it proved so much harder than I wanted it to be to add anything that didn’t already exist. I don’t know the WordPress ecosystem like I do Next’s, but I just wanted to write some code that fetched my book notes and displayed the cover images. Admittedly, I never sat down with an intentional focus to work on that problem, but I just *could not* figure out how to do it in WordPress.

I also wanted to add a few simple sentences to my /index, and that proved more difficult than I thought it should be. I had the markup written correctly, and my CSS properly written with classes styled, but I couldn’t for the life of me get the styles to be applied. Also, the browser on my phone was still using the original theme more than four days after I changed the original CSS. It must have been some sort of caching problem, but I couldn’t figure it out.

But I shouldn’t *have* to figure it out. I kept thinking to myself, “You know, your current site already has all of these features.” There were a few times I got the functionality *close* to what I wanted, but I realized with a personal site, I don’t want it *to be close*, I want the site to look and feel *exactly* how I want it to look and feel.

This is a major benefit of having a site built from scratch that I didn’t recognize before. I was focused on “owning” my content and ensuring there were as little “middle men” between my content and my content existing online that I was blinded of the huge blessing that having a site do, be, look, and perform exactly how I want.

I liked how [Mandy Brown put it in her post](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home) “Coming Home:”

> [having a personal website] allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given

When you have a personal site that you control, you can make it *whatever* you want it to be. If you want to build yourself a mini Twitter feed, [build yourself a mini Twitter feed](https://stream.thesephist.com/)!

The only real limitation to this is your technical ability, but once you have a site live and working, ChatGPT can help you build just about anything. And when you run into errors or bugs, it’s an amazing troubleshooter.

Yeah, having a site built from scratch and writing posts in markdown files isn’t near as convenient as using something that builds the entire site for you, but I finally realized that tradeoff is worth it to me. I’ll take a bit more friction to write posts if it means that I have 100% control over *everything* about my site.

If you have a personal site, whatever tool, software, or system you use, it should allow you to do *exactly* what you want.

If that’s *not* worth it to you, and you want a site that hosts words, looks great, and lets you write, I recommend [Pika](https://pika.page/).





Your site should let you do what you want


The downside of reading a series like People and Blogs every week is that, every week, I contemplate redoing everything about my blog—from the tech stack to the layout to the format. It takes a lot of self control not to “waste” time fiddling with the design or backend.

The upside of reading a series like People and Blogs every week is that, every week, I realize that although blogging is still a very niche “hobby,” there have been a lot of people doing it for a very long time. This is encouraging because when I find those sites and people I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, I get lost in a rabbit hole of reading the blog posts they wrote, sometimes before I was even alive!

This makes me feel good because I realize (1) everyone goes through constant redesigns of their blog, and (2) the type of stuff they post usually isn’t some world-altering idea, yet it’s interesting and fun to read nonetheless. This encourages me to just keep writing, and see who finds and resonates with it.

The latest guest, [Giles Turnbull](https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-giles-turnbull), was one of those. [Turnbull started blogging](https://gilest.org/) in the 90s, and his blog has gone through many iterations of design and tech. His current site is just HTML files with “terrible hand-coded CSS.” His posts range from documenting his honeymoon in India in 1995 (! before I was born), to his routine for taking care of a baby, to thinking about the permanence and tradeoffs of using a hosted CMS system. There isn’t really a “theme” to his blog, other than the fact that he thought about the posts, and then he wrote them.

Some people think your blog needs to be more. I don’t. A blog is your website. If other people like it, great! If not, they can visit the million other sites online.

This goes for other web projects as well. There was lately some “beef” about how Manu hosts the People and Blog series. Someone thought sending pre-formatted questions via email was not the proper way to conduct an interview. And they’re right. But Manu isn’t conducting “proper interviews,” his goals are:

> This series has two goals. The first, is to highlight wonderful and creative human beings and their blogs, helping you discover new content to read. And the second, is to show how social media is not the only way to inhabit the web.

If you don’t like how he does it, go find another series to read! Or, again, visit the million other websites on the internet.

I don’t like the TV shows my wife watches—Selling Sunset, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives—because they’re annoying. But there are a million other TV shows and movies—and things to be doing with my time—that are way more productive than writing emails or blog posts about how I don’t like those shows.

Make a blog what you want to make it. Make an online project whatever you want to make it. There are no rules. (Other than be kind!)