My wife wants to start a personal blog–no buying or selling, just a journal to share with whoever might be interested. No discussion forums. She is a Mac/iOS user. She is willing to spend a small mount per month, but not over, say, $10.00. She writes in MS Word.
I thought I’d seek the collective wisdom here: what do you recommend?
Blot might work well for her use case. I personally use it with Markdown and Git, but their Getting started page indicates that Word and Dropbox should work just as well.
It’s all of $5 per month. If you have your own domain, pointing to it is relatively simple.
Yes, sounds like an ideal use for Blot. Once set up, she won’t have to do anything except start saving her writing .docs files in a specific (Dropbox or Google Drive) folder.
Another is Montaigne which turns Apple Notes into a website.
Free, but requires a plan ($5/month or $50/year) for a custom domain.
Micro.blog is $5/month for its basic tier, and has various posting methods. Entries are also viewable in social-media timelines, but you have a blog at its core.
I have been thinking of starting a blog/ personal website so this is timely topic for me also.
One thing is totally out of question for me is Wordpress with hosting. Just too much work.
This is why, though it may be a bit more expensive, I have chosen to use Squarespace. It is easier, less fussy, and takes far less time.
I think Squarespace has a good product but its quite expensive for a casual blog. I mean if you want to publish daily / multiple times a week its quite good.
Micro.Blog is one confusion nightmare.
I’d be very curious to hear your take on how/why you find micro.blog to be confusing. I’ve been over there for awhile but I’ve often seen users over there say the same thing.
If she has her own domain, just spool up a Digital Ocean Basic droplet for $6/month and install your own wordpress or whatever you want.
So it’s essentially a Twitter like timeline for people who pay 5$ a month and when you write something long enough, it becomes a post.
I now understand what it is now but it breaks something in your head.
IMO, Some posts and long posts have totally different style of writing and one text box for both breaks something in my mind.
Really break your brain by writing micro.blog posts in Ulysses! ;D
I’m really cautious recommending Wordpress to non-technical people unless they’re using Wordpress.com because most are going to be terrible about keeping up with updates; and security is such a big issue on Wordpress. Hosting a VPS only compounds the chance of doing something wrong that leaves you open to vulnerabilities.
And if I’m on hook for support I’d really prefer something that has no chance of needing me to touch PHP, no thanks 
As someone who used to run a Wordpress Multisite installation for my campus, I’m 100% with you on this.
This was my Facebook entry from about five years ago:
The last day and a half:
Realize that the server that our WordPress Multisite installation runs on needs to have PHP updated for security reasons. Figure I might as well update the server’s OS while I’m at it. So:
(1) Update CentOS.
(2) Attempt to update PHP. Discover I can’t do it because the installed version of phpMyAdmin isn’t compatible.
(3) Attempt to update phpMyAdmin. Discover I can’t because the current version requires a newer version of PHP than what’s installed. :eyeroll:
(4) Uninstall phpMyAdmin.
(5) Update PHP.
(6) Reinstall phpMyAdmin, using the most current version.
Test the installation. Great! Everything’s working, with just one exception: I can’t log in to phpMyAdmin via a web browser. No, I don’t have frequent need to do that, but I should be able to. Grr.
(7) Spend a few hours trying to figure out what the issue is. Try a few things, to no avail

(8) Finally realize it may be a MySQL issue, and check the version. Yep. The version I’m running isn’t compatible with the version of phpMyAdmin I just updated to.
(9) Update the MySQL version.
And now I can log in. Whew!
All’s working — but this all took longer than it should have.
Finally decided on Wordpress.com. Thanks to everyone who helped.
Wrote a small post about it also :
Here’s why you should have chosen Ghost over Wordpress: Wordpress vs Ghost
Just playing, of course. While I do prefer Ghost over Wordpress for simpler blogs that are ready out-of-the-box (for the most part), it’s ultimately up to personal preference, in my opinion!
I myself stick with Jekyll since I like the tinkering aspect of it all, and I prefer to write in Markdown. Just to add a comment with some substance in this thread, here’s my setup when writing film reviews for my little personal blog:
1. Write the review in iA Writer (previously I had used Ulysses.)
2. Edit in ProWritingAid to clean up any errors (just started using this instead of Grammarly and love it!)
3. Paste the now-edited Markdown into VSCode with proper YAML headings for Jekyll, and add any linked images. Like so!
4. Push to my private git repository on Github from VSCode.
5. Netlify builds and serves the website after detecting changes in the Github repo. This runs jekyll build and some other stuff, building the public-facing site and converting the Markdown articles to HTML.
6. I check out my blog post and see if I need to change anything real quick. I don’t really test my posts beyond a quick preview then publishing to the site, so sometimes I may see it with my site’s theme/layout and want to swap some photos around or something.
If anyone is interested in what the finished product looks like, you can find my main movie review page here!
I vaguely recall starting this workflow before Github Pages allowed private repos for static sites, but I don’t care to switch to GH Pages from Netlify at this point since Netlify doesn’t cost anything at my use anyways. That being said, this official guide on Github can get anyone reading this up-and-running with a free blog like this super quickly, cutting out the Netlify middle man. I’d encourage anyone who has been thinking of blogging to take a look and start your own, it’s easier than you’d think!
Also, there are lots of ways to set up user analytics on your blog, but my favorite (right now) is Plausible, which is pretty cheap at $9/month for up to 10k pageviews, and is much, much more privacy focused than something like Google Analytics, all while making sure your site stays snappy and quick to load.
I agree with you for the most the part apart from the cost. I got the Wordpress starter plan as I really just want to write.
Costwise, Ghost 1 year plan was costing more than 3 years of WP.
Ah yeah, I wasn’t really taking cost into account here, but that should obviously be a determining factor when choosing something like this.
One thing I really liked about Ghost when I used it (for a short period of time, just trying it out) was how insanely easy it was to create newsletters and membership tiers, like Substack but with much more control. That was what I was trying to get into at one point, having free posts with some paid posts, but I don’t get nearly enough visitors on my website to begin with to start doing something like that.
I’m sure there are probably plugins and what not on Wordpress that also streamline doing this, but I’ve never tested it.
Cost, however, is a big reason why I use the workflow I do, with Jekyll+Git. It’s essentially free, minus the yearly cost of the domain name ($10/year) and optional analytics with Plausible for $9 a month. I get like, maybe 1 to 3 visitors per day, which is abysmally small, so I absolutely don’t want to pay for more than I need to when writing what I want to write.
Love the look of your blog by the way! I’m a sucker for minimal themes that focus on the content that’s written instead of all the bells and whistles.
Thank you for your kind words. 
