When the system no longer works

30 Aug, 2026

I mentioned in my first entry here that I have another blog — my "official" blog — that houses my "official" web presence. When I finished Keystone Calamity in 2014 and looked into how to get published, I read that you should have an author website and try to build your own presence to reach readers. Sure, I could see that. It made sense.

Thus, I scraped my previous online existence into the bin as best as I could. I made the blogs and journals of my teenaged years and early 20s private and tucked them away so that I might craft a professional appearance that I could point out to prospective agents and say, "See? Look how snappy and proper I am!" I went from WordPress to Ghost and built my blog and website on those platforms, hoping to seem put-together and … it never quite worked. I don't think I quite understood why until the other day.

There are a couple of problems here:

I made the blog the focal point of my website. I like blogging and journaling a lot; I do them in my spare time, on a personal level. I wanted to use my blog to connect with my readers, but at its core, the website was supposed to be about me and my writing. Instead, I had the blog entries splashed on the front page and all the static pages became a side dressing to my amateur articles. The blog was the entire website.

I had forced myself into a specific type of blog content. I wanted to write helpful articles for other writers; I wanted people to be able to learn from my own struggles and missteps.¹ That's what it started with — but those entries were very difficult for me. They took a lot of planning and re-writing because they weren't really blog entries so much as blog articles. They were practically essay-adjacent. Gone were the days of nonchalant rambles about my daily life or what books I was currently reading. There was no room for video game rants or even a blurb about programming. I sometimes still tried to write those entries but they always felt at odds with the article-styled content that I had fallen into.

The move to Ghost was meant to be a fresh start where I found my new internet voice and the right middle ground for everything I wanted to be and spout online. It didn't quite work, though. I think this is in part due to the nature of the blogging software I used: all blog posts are treated the same. I guess I could have made the more structured articles into their own static pages, but it felt cumbersome and unintuitive. It might be because those were the "official" blog entries I had been making on the website since I started my professional journey in 2014. They were basically the only entries.

Finally, I could never seem to find my tone. Sometimes I'm silly, other times I am serious. Sometimes I like pastel pixel art and other times I want really elegant serif font with moody, gothic colours. I go through phases (I am Melissa's dopamine-starved brain.) but the blog-centric, article-heavy online presence I'd cultivated never meshed with my malleable, nostalgic self. I always wanted to change themes and find something that was more "me" — whatever that meant at that moment — but I never seemed to be able to, likely because the system just didn't work.

I'd started to realise that back in July when I made a post on Bearblog. I'd initially signed up so that I could get my username and keep Bearblog in my back pocket as a sort of "just in case". When I read through the Terms of Service,² it mentioned that subdomains that were empty and unused for a period of time would be subject to removal in order to prevent domain squatting. In all fairness, that makes sense and is within their rights.

However, I panicked. That's essentially what I was doing — subdomain squatting. I didn't want to lose this outlet, even though I didn't have any intention at the time to use it. I had my "official" blog, right? Why would I need this free blogging platform that didn't have comments and deep analytics or a newsletter/email service unless you paid for it?

I still made that first post, though. I was desperate to keep this little pocket of the internet and I had to take a hard look at WHY that was. Why did I want to be here? Why did I have so much more fun browsing the blogs in the Discovery feed than I did looking through Ghost's Network page?

I mean, if you're still here, reading this post, you probably already know the answer to that. This place is full of real people, making real posts, talking about their real lives and interests. Sometimes the posts are silly and manic, and other times they're serious and morose. They're not calculated posts, made by businesses to reach the maximum yield on email clicks. These are real people writing and real people reading.

My first entry in this blog opined that I wanted a place to be more informal; I wanted to jot down my thoughts and talk about random things in my life. It wasn't just that, though.

I wanted to change my system.

Very quickly, I realised that what I actually wanted was to de-couple my blog and website and serve them up individually. I didn't want people visiting my website to have my blog forced upon them; I wanted my website to be a place for my writing and projects, created with care and passion. If someone wanted to read my blog, they definitely could, but it would be a separate link. I wanted to write solid, longer articles that would be separate from the ramblings of a blog. Maybe the seeds of those articles would start in some random entry in the blog, but they would have their own place to breathe and exist on the website.

I think that's where I'm at. I'm looking at redefining how I engage with and present myself on the internet. That's a pretty heavy statement, but it's where I'm at and that's okay.

#blog #personal #writing