The new Forest Garden Wales website. Was it worth it?!?
After days of building my own blog, I’m curious as to what other people are using and how well it fits in with social media.
My alter ego is a web designer. This is a blessing and a curse, for I have spent too long building the new Forest Garden Wales website blog and not enought time gardening. I ended up using Hugo, a rather nifty static site generator and a geekyish alternative to WordPress.
Would I have been better off using off-the-shelf blogging software? I really don’t know, which is why I’m keen to find out what other people are using – Blogger, Tumblr, Weebly, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress? And are people able to promote their posts on different social media? I know you can use JetPack and SNAP for WordPress but I’ve no real idea about other platforms.
The main reason for building my own blog is because I want to speed up and secure my garden blogging and social media workflow whilst retaining control over my content (oh, and because I can 😜). Hopefully, this very blog post will be automatically published to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, WordPress and LinkedIn. At the same time, the content will always be available on this site.
I think this control of your own work is a big issue, particularly in the light of recent Facebook revelations about their business model (which applies equally to Google et al). Combined with tracker blockers, it’s time to take your privacy back!
There’s still an awful lot left to do this website (self-hosted photos rather than using Flickr, a nice User Interface, comments, webmentions etc.) but hopefully I can share some of the lessons I’ve learned with other garden bloggers 😄.