More Reinventions than Madonna

I swear to God, I have spent more time re-skinning or “re-theming” my website over the past decade-and-a-half than I’ve done anything else. It’s had more reinventions than Madonna. When I first started blogging in 2010, it was on a free platform called Blogspot and this platform - provided by Google - did almost everything for you. Which was great, because none of it could break. Much.

You chose the style of blog you wanted, from a predetermined (and more importantly, pre-made!) selection and then you could choose which colour you wanted your headings to be and which font you’d like your words to appear in and you could tinker about with things like your navigation bar (menu) and create things like “tag clouds”, which were funky visuals showing people which keywords you used most.

Your Blogspot couldn’t crash from too much traffic, or load weirdly because you’d made some amateurish mistake with your coding trying to add a subtitle to every page; you didn’t have to know html, or how to upload something to your database using an FTP client and you absolutely did not need to spend over 395 hours (true story) attempting to make your blog homepage look like something that had been built by a tech team of over twenty developers, complete with live Instagram feed, pop-up subscription forms and a video of your showreel playing on a loop behind your logo.

But then things took off and many bloggers wanted something a bit more professional and so all of those aforementioned things became a constant bane. Most of us knew a tiny bit about website building but this was a learning curve so very steep that each and every handhold on the side of the mountain required at least a few hours of heavy Googling and trawling of help forums.

Well. After two full weeks of trying (in vain) to pull off the latest Madonna reinvention, which has left my website actually looking worse than it did in the first place, I’ve had enough. Last week was supposed to be my week off, and I spent the entirety of it discussing Wordpress migration issues with a chatbot called Kaydee.

But now I have a difficult decision on my hands, because I can’t very well sack the whole thing off altogether and start again. Even if I do now blog from Substack, I still have over 3,500 posts on my website that I am reluctant to just send off into the ether. And tens of thousands of people still look at them every month - that’s not a number to be sniffed at, is it?

And loads of them are really good, or really funny, or are just a really nice reminder of different times in my life. Look at this post, for example, written in March 2010. Way before kids, way before house moves - I didn’t even own a cat!