Hello, world!

WEEK 5

While my last two “firsts” were unplanned and emotional, this week’s activity has left me frustrated and feeling stupid. I massively under-estimated the skill, effort and determination required to set up my blog and site.

I take refuge in research and deliberation. I’m not a natural tinkerer. I follow the slow path: Seek out experts; read articles; take notes; watch tutorials and do it all again. In the case of launching my new site, this has brought me to a grinding halt made worse by the pressure to go live. I’ve been telling people about my 52×52 project with no blog to share!

It’s time to take this on…

The cheery-voiced tutorial said the first step is to select my platform and weigh the pros and cons of self-hosted vs. hosted blogs. If the site is my house, I learned, hosting is the land. There’s more: A self-hosted blog lives on its own server, and you pay a web host to host the site for you (hence the “self” in self-hosted), making you the owner of your site and responsible for keeping it protected and up-to-date. In contrast, with a hosted blog (could be free or paid), you show up with your goods and move in.

I chew up most of Saturday obsessing over the gravity of this decision and touring the major platforms. My head hurts.

As a hobby blogger, I was leaning to “hosted” because it’s less technical and arguably faster to get up and running, and I don’t want to delay further. But if self-hosting is akin to property ownership, that’s the more adult decision, right? I may be a hobby blogger now but what if?

I take the plunge to self-host, and the rest unfolded with minor hiccups. I selected wordpress.org as my platform, registered my domain, paid for hosting and installed wordpress on my account with one click. A few hours later, I had a modest (read: rudimentary) design, posted four weeks of offline blogs to their new pages, hit publish and … hello, world!

I won’t lie: I felt giddy after days of inertia and weeks of delay to have my own land, address and a starter home. No doubt the learning curve will be steep to decorate this place, hang some art on the walls and invite people in. But I’m taking my bow and curtain call for creating my first-ever website and an online home where this project will live.