Blogging: The Beginning
We already mentioned our failed first attempt at keeping a blog in the first post, but here's a more detailed description of how that went down and why we won't be trying the oft recommended self-hosted option again.
Going for a paid Hosting service may make you feel free and more of a professional, but it also means you're going to be in charge of a lot of important things. Like security. There are free security plugins, but you're really going to want to shell out for a paid option. Hackers don't care if you're a nobody, they're going to be pounding on that firewall from the start. Our previous blog remained very popular among Singaporean hackers even when we stopped posting and announced we were going to close it. No, we don't know why. What we do know is that the security reports from WordFence were a constant source of stress. Every time we went to log into the admin dashboard, we expected to find ourselves locked out of our own blog and forced to finally figure out how that bitcoin thing works. It never happened, but the list of blocked attacks was both disheartening and baffling. What could all these people possibly want from a new blog that didn't even sell anything on it? At least with Blogger, we don't have to worry about that.
Ever heard of sitemaps and indexing? We hadn't, and felt increasingly frustrated when our blog posts didn't show up in Google searches, even as we typed the exact title. After some more googling, we found out what the problem was: we had to register our blog on the various search engines. We only did it on Google Chrome and Bing, but it's easy to find instructions online on how to do it on Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). We went for Google Search Console first, which was smart, because the Bing equivalent (Bing Webmaster Tools) let's you sign in with Google and transfer all the data from GSC. There are plenty of plugins that generate sitemaps, which is one more thing we don't have to worry about with Blogger, and it's easy to find information online about it. There are also several sites dedicated to review WordPress plugins, which helped. A lot. So, we had now registered our blog on two of the most popular search engines in the world. That should be enough, right? Wrong. Submitting a sitemap doesn't guarantee your blog posts are being indexed. And why should it? We're just a couple of random bloggers trying to use snark to promote an indie digital comic book series no one has ever heard of. Google took one look at our blog and correctly guessed no one would be interested. Luckily, there's a way around it: URL inspection. Bing also allows for you to submit URLs individually. And that's what we did. For every single post and page we created. And it worked. The first post we saw online was ICYMI N K Jemisin Hates Lovecraft. Of course, having your posts appear on Google doesn't mean they'll be on the first page of search results, or the second, or even the third. The only post that turned up immediately was Peter Thiel: Evil or Incompetent?, because apparently no one else had ever thought to write about that very important question. However, this meant our posts were finally out there for anyone to accidentally see. Except no one did.
Even as we joined social media and began posting quotes and links, the only people who were interested in our blog were us and the hackers. Sure, we already expected to have to wait a while for the blog to take off, but not a single view? Tough crowd. The fact that we were paying for the privilege of being ignored by a greater number of people than usual made the situation more frustrating. So, constant worry + money + zero results made us decide to give up after around three months. Yes, we're impatient and possibly deluded, but we just couldn't see ourselves keep doing that. So, we pulled the plug on our blog, which felt a lot like a mercy killing, and at first planned to focus only on social media. However, we later realized that we still wanted to write stupid stuff without worrying about the number of characters and started our first Blogger blog, The Snarky Cats of Ulthar.
