I have a very on-again, off-again habit of writing. Sometimes I’ll have a lot to write about, and often I’ll go long stretches without writing much. I backed Micro.blog on its Kicskatarter the day it came out (happy birthday to me!), and it’s gotten me thinking about what blogging even is. Whoa.

I’ve usually considered blogging to be posts like this one. Longer things that I host on my website. But now I’ve got my microblog. I usually think of these posts as “Tweets that I own”. We all know that when you post content to a place you don’t control –  like Twitter, Facebook, or Medium – that you don’t own the post. Not the URL, the appearance, none of it. You gave them the things. But when you own the domain, you can control it all.

So my mental model of replacing tweeting on Twitter with Micro.blog was a good start. But now I see that microblogging is still blogging. Whoa.

Now I’ve got the itch for my website to feature both longer posts and microblog posts. I’ll have feeds for long content, micro content, and a mix of both. Posts should get to micro.blog through one of those feeds. And I’ll own the links to all of my content.

Now for the real question: how can I get this done?

I’m currently using Ghost to power my blog. But Ghost doesn’t seem interested in supporting microblogging (which is fine) so I’m going to look elsewhere. I don’t really want to use micro.blog itself because I don’t get enough control over things there.

What about Wordpress? I don’t like PHP, nor have I had good experience with them in the past. So that’s out.

I’ve been looking at Jekyll. That may end up being the winner but it will take some experimenting. I need to make sure existing links to ghost content will continue working and Jekyll ends entries in .html, but Ghost doesn’t. I’ll have to learn some level of nginx rules to get this done, is my guess.

But I think what I really want is something like Brent Simmons’s Wildcat system. I just wish it was written in Swift so I could understand how it’s put together. I’ve never worked in Ruby before, and while that’s not a dealbreaker it’s definitely additional friction.

I also would love to find something that can work with my text editor (Ulysses), can support image uploading automatically, and has Mac & iOS variants for me to write and publish posts easily.

This is going to take some time, and hopefully I’ll get it right.