That arch sure looks suspicious, what have you been doing?
Well besides stretching that opening, I’ve made some progress! You may notice that you’re reading on a real live blog at babyrace.biz! Let’s recap what I said I’d work on last time:
- Baby Makin’
- Blog
- Social Media / Audience
- Build a business that delivers value
The Baby Race Blog
I spent way too much time on this one – ideally I would have kept this short and sweet. Actually getting the blog up was fairly easy – it was deciding WHERE and HOW that took too much time. I looked at Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.COM, wordpress.ORG, and the option of building a static blog that I could host and update myself.
I was deterred from Wix and Squarespace initially due to the price. I have one site on Wix already and it felt not worth it for a blog with limited functionality. I don’t remember exactly but I think both were $20+ a month if you wanted a custom domain (which was a requirement for me).
I liked the pricing on wordpress.COM, but was deterred by the transaction fee and reading randomly somewhere that they might have rights to your content if you posted on them. I don’t know how valid any of that is and didn’t do a ton of research, because it was clear to me at this point I’d rather host it myself on AWS because that’s what I’m most familiar with and probably what I wanted all along.
Stop capitalizing WordPress .ORG and .COM, it’s annoying
Ah, but I did that so you’d ask! Actually an important distinction:
.COM is their “hosted for you” version – this one is more expensive, but is a more guided experience. I think this is good for folks who are non technical so they can just get going without any roadblocks
.ORG is the version that you have to run and host yourself. It’s a bit more of a janky experience, but it gives you more control
Self Hosted Static idea – i.e. Waste time playing with AI for fun idea
Blogs aren’t that complicated right? I could just upload a static site to S3 or source control and host it easily and cheaply on AWS amplify right? AI is good at writing frontends, this will be easy!
Wrong, blogs are a solved problem, use an existing solution. This is where I spent too much time. I noticed that CSS / HTML was very easy to generate (more on that later) with AI via GPT-4o. So the idea was, “What if I were to write markdown files in a local editor, then upload / commit them to a folder and convert them to HTML and quickly deploy a passable blog (written with an AI assist) for cheap?”
This sort of worked, but it was all a hassle, limited from a feature perspective, and I spent a lot of time trying to get the visuals / formatting right, and then the rest of the time trying to do workarounds to keep the site static so I wouldn’t have to have a server component for things like converting markdown to HTML. I think this is probably still somewhat viable but it’s just not worth the time right now to basically rebuild wordpress.
What I actually did: WordPress.ORG on AWS Lightsail
But if anyone is reading this you probably just want to know what I did, how I did it, and instructions to follow, so here you go!
I landed on hosting the blog myself via a VPS on AWS Lightsail and using wordpress.ORG. These instructions got me most of the way there.
At the time of writing this it cost $7/mo to run this server, but with 90 days free. This seemed like a reasonable deal to me and it gives me control over hosting it myself, but I also get the conveniences of someone else’s blog software and a host of plugins.
WordPress.org
It’s functional, it’s fully featured, it’s a little janky – it’s open source software. It doesn’t have the polish of the other options, but it suits me just fine for the personal blog use case. Even if I never write a custom plug-in or leverage the fact that it’s open source, I still like it and that’s what I’m going with.
Social Media / Audience
Oh man, this one is a struggle for me. I love privacy and I don’t like putting myself out there. But I powered through and created a couple social media accounts. The original plan was:
- Twitter / X
- (maybe) Skool
I’ve created a twitter and an instagram (linked at the bottom of the page in the footer!) For what it’s worth I kind of get the twitter thing. It can be informative / inspirational reading what other builders out there are doing and struggling with. I created a new twitter account and have only followed folks that are builders / inspirational. Following this practice has let my feed be almost all relevant / inspirational content instead of mindless entertainment / angry people, which is good for my mental game.
I’ve been trying to participate and post things that are on my mind, so follow along if you’re interested!
I’ve also had fun creating photos for the blog, and have been putting those on instagram, not a lot there, but I’m going to keep doing that at least per blog post.
Didn’t get around to Facebook / Skool, not sure if I will pursue those in the future, I’m going to keep at it on twitter / instagram for the time being!
Build a Business
Finally we’re here! Arguably the most important section, except for making a baby.
I mentioned I had some ideas. The one I’ve been working on this week is the casual easy entry event coordination and planning tool targeting hobbyists. I.e. Video Gamers, sports leagues, board games). I really believe this could be a useful tool for folks. I have 2 active users currently, myself and a friend of mine, but I haven’t advertised it outside of my group of friends.
Anyways here’s the site if you’re interested:
kickitapp.com
To be a bit more specific – the idea is that anyone can pop an invite in a Discord channel or a group chat, or text group and invite folks to do something and they can sign up, drop out, etc. No friction, very casual, just a quick way to invite folks to do stuff in a group without a million back and forth, “I’ll be there Wednesday”, “I’m out of town Wednesday” texts. The events are called Kick its!
Here’s an example Kick it if you want to check it out! If you sign up you can create them too!
If you add yourself to a Kick it list, its sends a Discord notification (this is configurable) and it also sends notifications on attendance changes – i.e. people coming and from the list.
Current use cases that I personally use it for are:
1) A weekly board game night
2) Playing games online with friends from all over the country that require a specific number of people
I’m happy with the progress I’ve made – I reworked the CSS/HTML to look a bit more modern than the old version, and did some back end work to make the experience more real time for users to see attendance.
There are 3 things I need to do:
- Start to market it – get people to use it and get feedback – share it in discords or elsewhere
- Figure out how to monetize it, I’ve been thinking about having multiple tiers, but I’m not sure. Will have to pay the hosting bills at some point
- Keep building!
I still have the other ideas from the last blog bouncing around in my head, and doubts on whether or not my time spent is worth it or if I should be working on something else. That being said, I’m pretty happy with the work I did on this site, and it’s useful to me, I hope you like it!
That’s a weird amount of colors, let’s move on, what’s next?
Here’s the new plan
- Read / post / comment on builder topics for inspiration and to grow my network at least once a day
- Post a blog update at least once a week
- Keep building!
- Keep baby making!
I’ll let you know how it goes – that’s it for now!
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