Have been running the same blog, on and off, since 2001. It has gone through many iterations, including being nuked and restarted several times, using archive.org as my backup.
The current iteration is optimized around not having it be a source of stress or anxiety for me. Here is my setup:
* I just use self-hosted Wordpress site on a Digital Ocean droplet.
* I made my own theme that strips pretty much everything out: it's one big page with 500+ posts on it, all text. No comments, images, video, anything like that. Minimal markup. Takes less than a second before the page can be interacted with.
* There are no post pages, and no archives (again, just one big page).
* Consequently, you search by pressing cmd-f in your browser, which is so much better than a search widget (and is the main reason I went with this design).
* I make entries whenever I want to, and then queue them up with a plugin that releases 1 post every 4 days, on a schedule. I have 112 posts in the queue, so I could not touch this thing for a year and it would be still running.
* My main goal for the blog is to record things that have happened: diary, commonplace book, repository for movie and book reviews. Not to make money or be a famous thought leader and influencer. I recognize that's not everybody's goal, but with those simplifying assumptions in place, it became super easy to make and maintain a blog.
The current iteration is optimized around not having it be a source of stress or anxiety for me. Here is my setup:
* I just use self-hosted Wordpress site on a Digital Ocean droplet.
* I made my own theme that strips pretty much everything out: it's one big page with 500+ posts on it, all text. No comments, images, video, anything like that. Minimal markup. Takes less than a second before the page can be interacted with.
* There are no post pages, and no archives (again, just one big page).
* Consequently, you search by pressing cmd-f in your browser, which is so much better than a search widget (and is the main reason I went with this design).
* I make entries whenever I want to, and then queue them up with a plugin that releases 1 post every 4 days, on a schedule. I have 112 posts in the queue, so I could not touch this thing for a year and it would be still running.
* My main goal for the blog is to record things that have happened: diary, commonplace book, repository for movie and book reviews. Not to make money or be a famous thought leader and influencer. I recognize that's not everybody's goal, but with those simplifying assumptions in place, it became super easy to make and maintain a blog.