When I chose the little icons I use to distinguish the topics in this website, I had a choice of a variety of skin colours, from Caucasian to dark.
However, the light brown face that most closely matched my own skin colour came equipped with a moustache.
I turns out that, forced to make a choice, I identify more as not wearing a moustache than I do with my own skin colour.
The three decisions I made to get from no website to an empty website, ready to start writing were:
WordPress is a mess. However, it’s the most commonly used content management system. That means there are a lot of plugins for adding extra features, such as automated tweeting, that make the website run the way I want it to.
I chose Pressable as my WordPress host because I wanted support from the people that make WordPress.com but with the ability to stage changes in a clone of the site before putting them into production.
They use the same servers as WordPress.com, so I expect them to be reliable. They also have the same quality of support people as WordPress.com, and I’ve found them to be very helpful.
I was disappointed that the built-in backup was only once per day rather than the real time backup that I know they also can provide. The double whammy with the daily backup is that you can’t encourage the backups to happen in a given timeframe, so the backup might happen in the middle of your working day. I’d rather set a batch of tasks, get them done and then know they were part of a set of work. Either they’d all be in production or they’d all be backed out by the restore, but not half and half because the backup happened halfway through a task.
I thought about having separate websites for each of the things I write about. This would allow me to use a theme and a set of plugins ideal for each topic. An alternative was to use a single WordPress multi-site. In the end, I decided to use a single site because the content ideas are evolving and I imagine I’ll rearrange the same content many times until I’ve figured out how it’s all going to fit together.