For me, it's that time of the year - when the itch to start a blog and pour streams of consciousness out into the WWW starts to bug me again.
I have attempted to start a blog numerous times in the past decade, with my writing spreaded out across services and the majority sitting in computer folders nested like those Russian dolls. I never seem able to stick with any of them - Blogger gets blocked all the time, and there's no guarantee that Google's generative AI models aren't gobbling up each word as I type them out (their TOS probably permits that); Substack looks neat, but their leadership's prior responses to situations about writers on their platform have irked me.
Website builders were appealing to me as they allowed degrees of customization beyond the rigid default templates. I looked into having my own website and bought a domain a few years back. In hindsight, I should have done more research beyond "where to buy domains" - I couldn't (and still can't) justify the subscription price of $6 to $12 per month for these services. The internet has also decided to make other options incredibly difficult to figure out for beginners, for some reason.
My domain remains untouched to this day - to put things into perspective, I bought it on Google Domains when it was still a thing. I am currently a paying customer of Squarespace because of that (I winced as I typed those words). Killed by Google was a thing but I didn't learn from that (regretfully).
I am now determined to switch domain registrars and not let Squarespace raise price on me once again - that is on my to-do list for next week.
While looking for more affordable blogging options to use my domain with, I came across Mataroa. There are significant trade-offs for sure - I want to occasionally scribble all over my writing/fill the page with more visual cues than necessary/etc. (graphic design is my passion), and that is at odds with the premise of this service. But I can maybe find another place more fitting for that - I mean, $9 per year is an absolute steal. And the limit for media is workable (resizing and reducing the image quality as much as possible, probably).
(There are similar sites that may suit my needs for customizations better, but those also have built-in discovery features. I don't really want to have to worry about my writing being populated in a feed somewhere and it receiving reactions from total strangers just yet, even more so with how few people are currently on these platforms.)
So, yeah - test, test. First post done and dusted! See you soon for more words on here (hopefully).