It’s been about 6 months since I’ve moved out of the WordPress space for my daily job.
I’ve been heads down working on a new cyber security product that I’m super excited about. So much so, that I’ve not really focused on social media or WordPress for quite awhile.
But one thing has been a little interesting.
Recently, I came over to my personal website and noticed that I needed to do updates. Normally, this isn’t a big deal. Like every WordPress site out there, you are going to have to do updates.
This time around though, I had fresh eyes on the experience. This was the first time in 6ish months that I had to login to a site to do any type of maintenance on it and having a number of updates that I needed to do, caused me to rethink the issue.
Let me just say that as an aside, there are tons of fantastic hosts that offer a varying degree of management and updates to WordPress. I spent 5 years building product in that space.
This got me thinking about the process of updates, what I needed to do in order to get my site ready for me to actually write a blog post on. I’ll paraphrase a bit here and just say, that I didn’t have the experience I thought I would and it got me looking at alternatives to WordPress for the first time in 15 years.
Alternatives to WordPress
You heard me. If you follow me or know me, you’ll know that I’ve lived, ate, breathed WordPress for many many years. I’ve worked with some of the best people in the space and built a many products in the space.
So how could one bad interaction with updates cause me to look for an alternative? Glad you asked.
It wasn’t just the updates process that made me rethink about it. Honestly, I think I’ve been thinking about WordPress and the ability to write content on it for several years. More on that soon.
But this time around, it brought me to a brink that made me start looking for alternatives and I think I found something.
Write.as
I landed on write.as. I’m not going to go into all of the details around what got me here in this post (maybe I’ll save that for another), but suffice to say, I’m here. I’ve arrived. I’ve landed on something I think has my full attention and I’m ready to share it with all of you.
Write.as is a platform of sorts. You pay a small nominal yearly price and you get up to 3 blogs. Its focus is primarily on writing, which I love. I can just write. Until my heart is content. And then I can publish.
I don’t have to worry about fighting with Gutenberg or the TinyMCE editor of WordPress’ yesteryears.
I can just write.
I don’t have to focus on design, images, SEO, any of that technical details that make it harder to just hit publish. And I think that’s what I like most about this platform so far.
It just works. It doesn’t require me to get updates, work within the confines of Gutenberg, deal with design constraints while writing, or any of the bloat I felt that came with WordPress over the last few years.
Did you leave WordPress?
Short answer, No. I believe it is still an excellent product that allows a huge number of people to have a platform that they own, where they can build a blog or eCommerce site. In fact, I will still recommend and plan to use it for my own needs as I work on other projects from time to time.
But for me, personally, I wanted something I could just come to and add a post. I didn’t want to deal with anything else. Let me write, then let me leave.
Losing the Joy
I suppose at some point, I found issue with WordPress’ admin. I found it too complicated and too difficult for me to just write. Anytime you stop me from just doing what I want/need to do, where you give me choices, stop me in my tracks, I lose track. I lose what I’m doing in here, what I’m trying to achieve.
At the end of the day, I’ve only been using my site for writing. I’ve not really been growing an email list, building products/services with it, or trying to create a newsletter or podcast.
Yes, there are services where I can do all of that too…but for now, really I just want to have a site/platform that allows me to do the most simplest thing. Write.
And that’s where I think I’ve ended up with write.as for now. It’s the platform that gives me just a little of what I want/need in design, tooling, but most importantly writing.
I can write, publish and go back to what I was doing. For everything else, I think there’s other solutions for. If I wanted to build a newsletter, I’ll go to ConvertKit. If I want any type of landing page and email sequence, again I’ll go to ConvertKit.
That really just leaves long-form content. For me, that will live here on Write.as.
Maybe there will be a time where I move my personal site back to WordPress, but for now, I’m enjoying the simplicity of Write.as and giving myself a pass at being able to enjoy writing again.
Wrapping Up
I want to hone my skill of writing here. I have lot of lessons, trials, etc. that I would like to share. I want to do that first and foremost. I want to get good at telling stories, sharing my experiences here.
Hoping that others will find what I have to share useful, even practical to what they are working on in their own lives or careers. With any luck, I’ll be doing that in no time and you’ll see this site expand into something more than it is.
But for now, I’m good with is just being a place to write. Keeping it simple.
