A joke about cameras (that has no relation to the topic of this post), get it? Anyways, I went ahead and did it - subscribed to Mataroa’s premium plan. This domain actually points to something now! It only took me about… 4 years to do it.
In the time between sending a support email and receiving a response from Mataroa’s Theodore (thanks for the help!), I properly tried out Bear, another minimalistic blogging platform that I was also considering. The only thing that deterred me was the price tag - $49 per year - so I was pleasantly surprised that it was half-off for me thanks to Purchasing Power Parity (nice). I enjoyed writing in its text editor and tinkering with its features.
After a while, I started exploring ways to set up the blog as a proper website - creating pages, adding attributes that show things like when a page was last updated. I seek out other blogs for examples of what extent the platform can be pushed to… and swiftly came to a realization. I was losing sight of what I really wanted out of a blogging platform when I first started looking for one this time around.
The inclusion of CSS means that you can make your blog look completely different from the default theme - just look at Bear’s documentation/their Discover page and you will easily find examples of this in practice. I do consider this a plus for those who want to make their blog feel a bit more homey or creatives with the know how's to fully utilize it. I would love it too if I knew more about HTML and CSS; they are currently things I’m interested in and slowly learning about.
But that's beside the point, really; the hyper-fixation on how to visually present the blog starts to take time away from actually writing anything. This has always happened with me while using platforms that have overwhelming amounts of customization, being placed everywhere and drowning out the text editor.
I do graphic design and occasionally seek out creatives who do cool things. While visiting their websites, an observation I have is that there are two extremes: people who fully deck out their sites with complex elements and animations, overwhelming the senses of anyone who lays their eyes on the page; and people who only configure their website to the required extent, letting their creative work do the heavy lifting. There is probably a use for complexity - as a showcase of your skills to prospective clients looking for help with UX/UI - but for the most part, it is a distraction. A portfolio houses what you consider to be your body of work at one specific point in time, not for its design to play that part. I think it's the same for blogs: decorate as much as you want, but your words are still the main substance.
For now, I'm putting my foot down and working within the confines of this platform - one year feels awfully long, but from the moment I bit the bullet on domain/platform decisions to now, one month has passed. Procrastination is very real. This post took more writing sessions than I would’ve liked to complete. I only skimmed through what I had written (about 90%) and finished some in-between paragraphs, so if something feels iffy, I’ll probably address it in another post. Off to the webs you go.
I also started a Bluesky account for lower-case, daily whimsical posting if you’re into that. I posted about the custom domain handle on there, but there really is a marketing opportunity there that these companies are missing. Websites and domains, in many ways, still feel like products targeted at tech-savvy people and enterprise customers. That may be where the majority of their revenue comes from, but other groups of customers feel neglected completely. I am not part of the aforementioned groups, but I’m having a fun time finding out what I can do with my domain/website/presence on the WWW.
The custom domain handle use case feels very much in the same vein as Carrd and Straw.page, an area that none of the big companies in the space are capitalizing on. People undersell them as link-in-bio solutions, but it’s much more than that. These platforms are a form of self-expression, extending yourself beyond the boxes of social media and creating a space that feels uniquely you on the internet. Many cool things are being built on the web that even normies can try out and tinker with - the people building it and the companies selling it just have to be willing to market it as such. Not as some technological solution out of reach.