After two weeks of suffering and cramming snippets of PHP into my brain, it’s here. It functions, barely, but it’s here: a new blog.
Fears of Twitter dying have resulted in a mad scramble of creators dashing off to alternative platforms, Discord servers, and Tumblr. I’ve made some accounts on new platforms like Cohost, PillowFort, and even made a new Tumblr myself. So you might be asking, “Why make a new blog? That’s what Tumblr is for? And why build it from scratch?”
Because I did build it from scratch; I made the blog theme myself. Don’t look at the code by the way, it’s a mess. 😂 I have coding experience with HTML/CSS, have dabbled in other languages, so I’m familiar with variables, Booleans, etc. But I didn’t know PHP coming into this and I still don’t. Now that the blog is live, I can stop working on it so feverishly and can learn PHP properly.
But why build a new blog? There are pre-made themes…
Even before Twitter’s death was being proclaimed by doomsayers, I had the idea to make my own platform hosted on my website, which allows adult content. I could post whatever I want, no censorship, and have a real comment function. I wanted to feature posts that I wanted to highlight and I wanted to have advertisement space that I could rent to other creatives.
I hate the look of Google Ads and I wouldn’t get all of the ad revenue from them. This way, I establish a direct connection with other creators, give them a boost in exposure for a small fee instead of pay per clicks, and control how they appear on my site. I also wanted to utilize Amazon affiliate links in the way of book recommendations. I read a lot these days and I want to share what I’ve been consuming!
(Disclaimer: Affiliate links may give me a small commission on qualifying purchases you make. You don’t pay anything extra. I basically get a few pennies each time you buy a book I recommend.)
In order to make this happen, I had to build it. I couldn’t find a theme with the sidebar functionality I wanted, featured posts on the home page, and color palette freedom. So many themes will only let you choose a color for maybe three elements out of the whole theme! As an artist…how dare.
I loathe WordPress with a passion. It’s clunky. To get anything you want, like SEO tools, good analytics, or even just a search box, you have to use a plugin made by some other developer. There’s often hundreds of the same kind of plugin with varying features and pricing. Now that I’ve dug into building a theme, I hate it even more. Because there are plugins to give you features, it’s difficult to find the actual code to create those features on your own so you can completely control how they look in your theme.
And sometimes, the code you do find is either outdated, doesn’t work, or doesn’t come with any helpful knowledge about how it works so I know where to put the damn thing. It’s difficult finding a straight tutorial or course on building a theme from scratch. Even though I plan on learning PHP from the start, I know that it still isn’t going to make theme building easy. It’s such a convoluted mess.
/vent
And so, a blog was born.
IN SHORT I now have a blog. Since this isn’t hosted on WordPress’s platform and it’s not like Tumblr, you can’t follow it in the normal way. Instead, you can sign up for weekly emails here. Each Saturday, you’ll get an email with the week’s posts. In the future, I may find a better method of doing this or at least make the emails automated, but for now enjoy getting a handcrafted email from me every week, lol.
A note: The blog’s basic functions work. You can leave comments, view posts, click on tags, etc. There’s still a chance something may fail; please have patience as I work bugs out as they appear.
The search box works but right now it only covers title and post content. It doesn’t include categories or tags. I have plans on expanding it later.
Some appearance details may shift or get tweaked as I improve overall user experience and visual design. I want to investigate membership stuff; there may be some fun things I could do with you guys. I also need to put a contact form on here somewhere so you can report if something breaks. That should be up within the week.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, leave a comment below! I’m hoping to get some good life out of this blog so I want to make it stable and easy to use.