Code Can Change Everything (for a Blog)

I’ve been writing publicly every single day for the last 15 years starting in 2001. It’s a streak that I plan on keeping and the beautiful thing is that it’s not even that hard to keep going either — it’s just something I love doing.

And I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 and then started building on top of it a few years later. I can’t believe it’s been that long as well.

And the reason that I used it then and still to this day is that you have absolute control over everything with the system; the design and the user experience that you’d like your users to encounter as well as the underlying codebase of not just the template but the core.

This level of ownership drew me first as a writing tool and second as a technology platform. It’s continued to evolve and grow and now powers over 25% of the web. Unreal growth in every way imaginable.

But the evolutions have not always been kind and, as software goes, there have been a handful of releases that were cringe-worthy for many of us long-time WordPress users.

And, the general movement to a more “robust web solution” made many digital writers move toward newer technologies and writing platforms, including such things as Ghost and Medium.com and even Tumblr as not just as personal solution but also one for the enterprise.

And there isn’t a shortage of new entrants into the blogging space — take Typed as a great example and one that I have personally supported. It’s clean, conservative, and the folks behind it are passionate about writing and have a long history of building great products.

Yet, as much as I have loved WordPress their move away from “just” blogging to a more Content Management System has given me pause over the years and challenged me to consider going full-time on another platform. There’s no question that it feels exponentially more bloated than it used to be.

Given that I’m infinitely more interested in writing, itself, than the technology that powers it I have written such articles like this one: How I’d Start (or Restart) a Blog if I Were to Begin Today.

The TL;DR version is quite simple: Choose Medium.com and then just go, get started, and don’t worry about all of the configuration or customization. For many, this is a good solution and one to seriously consider if you’re starting fresh (or anew).

But every once in a while I’m reminded, viscerally, why I personally still love being able to reach up underneath the hood and make changes. Most of these changes are small and relatively insignificant but, on occasion, the results are astronomical.

Take for instance an experimental blog property that I’ve been messing with for a little while. It was steadily doing, from what I could 20 to 30,000 pageviews a week (or a couple thousand a day). Not bad, right?

And it was surely and steadily growing — not a massive amount of growth and no serious spike, but, it was healthy and an experiment worth continuing.

But something was wrong and for months I just let it go. The graphs, themselves, can tell the compelling story for itself:

In short, I made a small yet significant update on the core WordPress install as well as the template and design. The pageviews shot up like a rocket, now doing 140 to 150,000 pageviews a week! The lowest days are always north of 10,000 pageviews and I’ll see close to 30,000 on the better days of the week!

I made sure it wasn’t just an anomaly via one analytics package and so I made sure I was getting similar figures via another one that I use (I use Jetpack and Google Analytics):

Boomtown. I couldn’t believe it.

Now, why did I think that there was “something wrong” with the current system? It’s because, historically, I had seen a major growth curve starting to build and then it fell flat, and then completely flat-lined (as you can see below).

So something was working around April / May / June of 2015 and I wanted to capitalize on this growth with a new look and some development work on the back-end. I was excited but I broke something and didn’t fully Q/A a few of the plugins that I had installed in my exuberance.

In addition I incorrectly believed that a recent major update in Google’s search algorithm (SEO-related) had essentially “reset” the organic results and the traffic that I was seeing and just blindly believed that my core WordPress install and new design and plugins were working as advertised.

Things dropped dramatically but, since it was an experiment, I was fine with that. And, to be honest, I just didn’t have any time to invest in it…

Until a year later when I had a few moments to spruce things up, return to developing the project further, and dug in to analyze what had gone wrong. Again, I had a hunch but I need to technically figure it out.

Long-story short, I changed things up, fixed it manually, and boom, the growth picked up again and has continued to do so month-over-month:

The net-result of all of this is, again, a deep and personal reminder that being able to control your writing technology end-to-end is powerful. But, it’s a double-edged sword since I messed it up in the first place!

In the end the most important thing is that you’re writing as much as you possibly can. Scientifically, the benefits of writing are too numerous to ignore. You should do it.

Finally… for what it’s worth, I do love Medium and cross-post my blog posts there. Not all of them but a lot of them. Heck, I’m even building a macOS writing client called mnml app that’s due out soon. So, yeah… much love, much love.

The end. Code can change everything.

[If you need a good infographic comparing Medium and WordPress then here’s one for you.]