One of my greatest challenges over the course of my career has been figuring out a cadence of content production that I've been happy with. I've had different points in my life where I was creating content so easily, and then at some point, it slowed to a crawl and would happen in spontaneous bursts. And while this has worked, it's always left me feeling rather unsatisfied and frustrated with how things have gone.

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For the record, there's no "right" way to create content. Everyone has a different cadence that works well for them. And especially when content is free, you shouldn't feel pressure to keep up with the output that full-time creators (who often have teams supporting them) publish.

The Problem

As a professional web developer, I've always taken great pride in being able to build my own site and configure things as I see fit. However, as requirements began to tally up in a backlog that never seemed to get any shorter, my content production suffered because...

  • Lack of scheduling future publishing. With a simple static site and no CMS powering the site, it was rather tricky to get a proper scheduling system up and running. And while I know plenty of people have achieved this, I never found the time to get this working which made it hard for me to create a consistent output of content.
  • Dissatisfaction with the current site theme. Though I had full control over any feature or UI element on the page, any changes or bugs I ran into basically required a proper redesign and implementation (across all responsive screen sizes of course) for it to be properly worked on.
  • Never-ending desire for more custom things. In addition, I'd always see opportunities for improvements in my site that I felt "needed" to be implemented before I could release more content.

And while we can chalk all that up to a bunch of excuses at the end of the day, the reality is that the mental hurdle and pressure of needing to "built it all myself" came at the expense of me spending time creating content.

The "Boring" Solution

So where am I today? I've decided to embrace the simple solution of let go of the desire to build it all myself and opt-in fully to GhostCMS.

Why GhostCMS?

To put simply, the following features with have been woefully lacking from my site that I've been wanting for ages are built right in:

  1. Ability to schedule content in advance
  2. Built-in newsletter functionality
  3. Ability to have memberships for free vs paid content
  4. Comments system for members on blog posts

Finally, perhaps most importantly, it came highly recommended from a lot of people I respect and trust. That combined with my own experiments with it over the past few months have also shown me that it's flexible enough that if I should feel inspired to add custom things in the future, that's still within my ability to do so.

Does it bother you to use a platform instead of building it yourself?

I'm not going to lie. This was a hard decision 😅. The developer in me wants to rebel and figure out how to build it all from scratch, but at the end of the day, it came down to one single question:

Is it more important for me to consistently put out content or be able to say I built the site myself?

Closing thoughts

I know some of you may say that I could have it all, but I've learned the hard way that given my other priorities in life, the ability to say I built my own website infrastructure from scratch pales in comparison to things like:

  • Contributing more time to open source
  • Creating educational content for topics I care a lot about and has been sitting in my backlog for months if not years
  • Spending quality time with friends and family
  • Exploring and learning about many other things in life

So here's to the first of many blog posts to come because of the time that embracing the boring solution is saving me. 🍻