I am stubborn when it comes to products I like.

It’s 2019, and I still use a Windows Phone. I think the Windows Phone OS is superior to Android and I’ve hated every Apple product I ever used. (I may be one of the last Windows Phone holdouts in the US, but I just got a notification through What’s App, the main app I need, that they’re killing support on December 31.) This may be a family habit – my dad held out on Betamax for years, insisting that it was a superior product to VHS.

And while my Windows Phone days are drawing to an end, I am still, to some extent, using a version of the web from ten years ago: the internet that I choose.

My Version of the Internet

• I claim this blog as my platform, owning my domain name and webhosting.
• I ardently follow my favorite blogs via RSS.
• I deleted my Facebook account (insofar as you can), after using a plugin to block the newsfeed for years. I hard-blocked myself from Twitter because I found myself thinking in tweets. I deleted all but a handful of the tweets I’d ever posted. I go back and forth on Instagram, deleting the app for a few months at a time and reinstalling.

The Cost of Hosting My Own Site

Recently, I stumbled across a movement called IndieWeb, whose philosophy matches mine: own your content by posting first on your own site, then syndicate elsewhere. But the choice isn’t without cost.

There is an actual cost to owning my own platform; I pay about $13 a year for my domain, and about $150 for webhosting.

There’s also a time and knowledge “cost” in needing to maintain the site. I just want to have a place to post things, but it seems like I’m constantly running WordPress updates, figuring out some new extra (like caching), and needing to change some configuration or other because security or TOS or *insert reason of the day.* I need to have special software to upload files to my site and make edits to my child theme. It would certainly be easier to post stuff on social media and call it a day, and would take a whole let less sleuthing and troubleshooting and site maintenance.

Why It’s Worth It to Me to Host My Own Site

I believe in longform writing – and more importantly, longform thinking. Social media isn’t conducive to complexity or length. Giving myself a place to think and write at length has helped me process ideas and grow personally to a great extent. Having a place to write has made me write more, giving me valuable practice and letting me find my writing voice. (Sure, I use sentence fragments and participial phrases like no one’s business, but this is the way I like to write, that feels like me. Hate that I make single sentences their own paragraph? You don’t have to read what I write.)

Because it’s my own, unmonetized blog, I feel no compunction against using it for whatever I want or need a platform for. My blog is a handy place for me to track self-experimentation and provide accountability for myself.

There is power in knowledge. Given half an hour I could roll up a new WordPress blog or a simple html-only site — as long as there is webhosting to be had, I have the ability to run my own platform. I cannot be silenced by the end of a platform owned by someone else. And while I may need to troubleshoot issues that seem annoying, or research how to do something that seems like it should be easy, there’s value in knowing how to figure things out as well as knowing how to do them in the first place.

Banner from my first real homebrew website, Kaeldra and the Impervious Creature, from 2003! I used tables for layout o_O Everyone starts somewhere!

Marketing has inundated every aspect of our lives, and I believe there should be places we can be people, not products. My blog is ad-free by choice. You, dear readers, are not monetized here. No faceless corporation selling you more “stuff” you don’t need, just me sharing tools and thoughts from my own journey.

My Blog Manifesto

I’m a marketer (currently using my skills to market social good in local government). I know how I could monetize this site, change what I write, and how, to optimize for SEO and content marketing strategy.

But I choose not to. Money is not what I want to gain out of this website; I’d like to gain self-knowledge, grow my ideas through reflection and discussion, and support other creatives with helpful tools and resources.

EDIT 7/19: After reading this article about the proliferation of personal data and the fact that laws seem concerned with what businesses are allowed to do with our data, not whether they should be allowed to collect it in the first place, I have decided to remove Google Analytics tracking from my website. I am not doing anything particularly useful with the data, merely using it for my own curiosity and learning and figuring out which articles people read so I can fine-tune them, but that is not worth participating in the collection of your data. So (unless I missed something) I am no longer tracking your data when you visit this website.

Pages from quarterly review process of the Craft Your Life Planner

I’ll share tools I have made, like my Craft Your Life planner, because I created them to be helpful. The planner is free now, but if I one day charge for it will create a separate website dedicated to selling it — this blog’s purpose is to provide a platform for my own thinking, not to sell things. I do link to my Society6 shop where I’ve added some of my illustrations available on stickers and useful items, because I consider that a way to share my art (and don’t at this point have the interest or skills to develop my own supply line).

This blog is my internet version of the American Dream: a teeny slice of the web to stake a claim and call my own. Like Aesop’s fable of the dog and the wolf, I don’t believe the ease of walled gardens provided by social media outweighs the freedom I have in running my own platform. I’ve been running some form of my own website since 2003, and don’t plan to stop.