A New Home

Kenneth Clayden
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

I like stability and structure, I do, it’s who I am — I like a place to put my thoughts and stories that is not my YouTube channel. I think I do this because while YouTube is a great place to tell stories, it’s not a great place for an actual writer with those sorts of stories. Previously I have written on blogs hosted on Blogger—multiple times I’ve had to fix error after error to create an identity for myself on Blogger (their built-in templates were not the best for someone wanting a place to create content that felt unique, and not just like anyone else’s) — before I moved to Squarespace. Yet moving to Squarespace was a big step: I had to put money into the Domain to transfer it to them, and I had to pay for the hosting—Blogger’s system allows for an unlimited amount of content to be hosted there for free, with the only payment being to whomever you pay for the Domain (mine was Namecheap before Squarespace) — and this just wasn’t worth it for one thing: this writing thing is a hobby. It’s not like I get a large audience reading my works, and so to pay anything — I didn’t mind paying for the domain—when I don’t have much money, just didn’t make sense to me. So I closed my blog, and put my idea of placing my writing on the internet to bed because I didn’t want to go back to Blogger — I couldn’t: I’d had a seamless experience with Squarespace that I couldn’t get with Blogger, and had I been able to just throw money away, I would have happily stayed with the company. On Twitter I explained that I’d deleted my blog, and that the domain would run out when it ran out, and that would be that—and I was given the suggestion by a follower that I could try using Wattpad, but again like Blogger — and I have used Wattpad—while the service is free, it is tainted by the mass culture of fanfiction writers present on the site. I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but I care about my writing, and with the reputation of Wattpad being as it was — filled with the writers that it was (not saying anyone who writes fanfiction is a bad writer, it’s just not the highest calibre I guess)—it felt like I’d stepped forward on my own, and then stepped back. I entertained the idea for a second, but I didn’t end up going through with that.

[Enter Medium]

I once wrote an article on Medium for the Synapse publication entitled Dear Education, which you can read for yourself if you wish by clicking the title there. But beyond that article however, my interaction with the site as a writing platform was limited to the “stories” feature Medium uses in place of comments — you write a reply to another’s story, and it in turn becomes a story. That was it. It was only by chance that I remembered Medium and decided to begin using this as my new blog — my new place to share written content.

So my writing journey isn’t over — in fact, since I’ve lost the content I had created—I didn’t realise I could export my content from Squarespace (which now I cannot do since I would need to resubscribe to their service)—you might say that it’s reborn. Feel free to check me out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube


Kenneth Clayden

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Kenneth Clayden

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So I deleted my old blog, and now this place will be where things go that I want to write

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