parkrun is an organisation which organises free 5k events all over the world every Saturday morning with the help of local volunteer teams. There are more than 700 weekly events in the UK and I’ve completed 67 of them.
I’m a long time parkrunner https://www.parkrun.org.uk/results/athleteresultshistory/?athleteNumber=129738
who turns 50 in 2025. One of the goals I’ve always wanted to do is complete at least 50 parkruns in a calendar year, and with my imminent big birthday, I want to complete this before then. I’ve not managed to do it up until now because I volunteer a lot which means that I can’t regularly also run the events.
So next year I’m going to run at least 50 events, and if I can manage it, I’m going to run at 50 locations I’ve not run at before, possibly with a few outside the UK thrown in.
The reason for this post is that a few people I know want to follow my progress, so I would love to create a blog including photos and write ups. These won’t be short enough to go on Mastodon or Micro.blog. I don’t want to open up my facebook to the world. I don’t want to run a blog myself. I want something which is maintained for me, but easy to post to with a wysiwyg interface. I’m happy to pay a small monthly amount (probably about £10). After the challenge is completed I’ll take it down again I’ll then collate the content into a print book about it (one copy for me)
Does anyone have any recommendation for me please?
A lot of people use WordPress.com – it’s hosted, so you don’t have to worry about servers. Lots of people use WordPress, so there are a lot of resources out there. It can get fiddle and complicated (I understand) but doesn’t have to.
Another option I think is quite elegant: blot.im – it runs off markdown documents you put in a specific folder in Dropbox (I think other services work as well). Very simple, though there are also themes and bells and whistles if you want them, though I do t think as much as WordPress. This is the route I would go, since I already use markdown for most things.
To answer your actual question, they advertise a lot so it’s easy to be skeptical but squarespace/wix/etc. are actually easy to setup and manage.
I like to think that you can go the route of Wordpress or some other website building software which involve buying a server and have a high up front cost (in time and energy learning) but a lower monthly cost whereas squarespace/wix/etc is a higher monthly cost in order to not have to pay the up front cost for getting up and running.
I also don’t love really love Medium but I imagine hosting a blog there would be easy and possibly even free.
Wix, Squarespace & co. are incredibly difficult to export data from as opposed to WordPress.com (the hosted version) which promotes openess etc. I just helped a friend ‘move’ his website from Wix to self-hosted WordPress and we essentially did not move anything but recreated the whole site in WordPress as Wix has no export options whatsoever (they want to lock you in). Just something to keep in mind.
Ah I didn’t note the difference between Wordpress the software and Wordpress the service
This actually reminded me of https://ghost.org as well which is very similar to Wordpress but with different Web Tech. (and from what I can tell the entirety of the content you upload can be accessed via an API as well as through the generated website)
Let me know if you do any in North London @geoffaire ! It’s been a while since I’ve done one but Highbury Fields is a pretty good one I’ve done a few times
There’s no limit on length of post on micro.blog hosted blogs. Posts just display differently in the feed if they’re over a certain length. Sounds like it might be a good solution.
To be fair at the moment, I’d describe what I do as a Walk,run strategy. That’s another reason to do this challenge, to get me running regularly again.
I’ll second Blot. It is super easy to write and bonus all your files/posts are saved to Dropbox just in case. $20/year is tough to beat. Also, cool project. I turn 50 in 2025 and have a couple things planned as well.
