Hey, speak for yourself!! 
Thanks, everyone, for your kind and, as always, helpful responses. As always, each of you is a fount of wisdom! I will look at the options and suggestions, step back, and think carefully before deciding. It is best to “look” before jumping. 
1 Like
The blogging world has one opinion. I have another.
I have tried using Wordpress with untitled posts but I feel like it’s dangerous — that it might break something, and I might not find out about the breakage until it had done a lot of damage. Eventually I moved to micro.blog because Wordpress seemed to have too many switches, knobs and controls. It’s a corporate website publishing system that happens to do blogging.
Regarding @Bmosbacker’s original question: I endorse Micro.blog. I’ve been happy using it for almost two years now and anticipate many more years to go.
I know I expressed qualifications earlier, but I think my problems have come up because I’m trying to stretch Micro.blog to do unusual things that it’s not designed for, and which are beyond my skills to implement. So I try to do something Micro.blog isn’t designed to do and in the process I break my blog.
That’s actually completely backward. It is a blogging platform that people have cobbled a fancier webpage editor on top of. Even this late in the game, the underlying architecture is fundamentally that of a blogging engine. Everything else is a cobbled-together add-on.
There is no technical reason any WordPress post needs to have a title that is entered into WordPress, but it would make sense to have something on the backend – if for no other reason then to make it easier for the author to find things.
That said, the governing assumption that all posts would have a title most likely derives from the HTML specification which requires that each page have a title, and that the title not be empty…
A page without a title is not conceived of by the HTML specification. And I would further suggest that, by implication, using the same generic title for every page is also not conceived of by the specification. 
2 Likes
I understand the point you’re making and it should be considered. However, I don’t think the calculation of “worth it” is quite that simple.
When I decided to set up my first blog in WordPress, I knew it would take me a lot of time on the front end to figure it out and work with it. But I didn’t see it as a “one-time startup cost,” but rather an investment in learning skills for the future.
As it turned out, a couple of years later I decided to start a new blog, and the skills that I learned with the first blog made setting up the second easy, and at a 2nd significant discount from Squarespace. It also helped me when I decided to migrate to Generate Press since I already had the basic skills.
So whether it’s “worth it” to learn to use WordPress depends on the users purpose.
Depending on the WordPress Settings → Permalinks, you do not have to have a title in the Title field; the path HTML page name can be generated based on date or serialization.
Some templates may require a title on the Post/Page Title field.
1 Like
I actually agree. As you said, the question is whether or not the skill that you learn is going to be useful in the future.
WordPress powers is a significant portion of the Internet, and it is useful for much more than blogging – so developing some skill at it would not be the worst thing in the world.
But for the average person who just wants to write, there are also significant benefits to having a platform where you do not have to do any maintenance, you never have to worry about the new version of the platform breaking your theme or your plug-ins, etc. in my experience, hosting that is advertised as “managed WordPress” gets you partway there, but not all the way.
Yeah, that’s definitely possible with permalinks. And just about any decent WordPress template would let you remove the title from the published post, and/or hide it. My point was addressing the idea that “the blogging world is wrong” for deciding that posts have to have titles.
Even if you generate the URL with serialization, date stamps, etc., and hide the title in the template, all independently displayed units of content still have a title. It is a required HTML tag. Having an optional field in the editor for people to fill in a title is not Incorrect behavior.
You can leave it blank if you want, but all that means is that you leave it to your platform to generate the title for you. 
I’m giving Ghost another try, despite having previously recommended Blot. Not that I have anything against Blot; it’s very good, but it has some limitations (and I think it’s a one-person shop). Ghost provides more flexibility and more room to grow.
The last time I tried Ghost, the only options I was aware of were hosting via Ghost itself, which was more money than I wanted to spend, or installing it myself on a host like DigitalOcean. Yes, I have the skills to do that. No, I don’t want to spend the time fussing.
Then someone over in the budgeting thread (I forget who) mentioned PikaPods. I hadn’t heard of it, so I checked it out, just out of curiosity. One of the apps they can set up for you in just a few clicks is Ghost.
I’m in the process of adding my existing content so I can get a good sense of what my site will look like. If I like what I see, I’ll point my domain at Ghost and cancel my Blot subscription. And I’ll probably end up spending less than I do with Blot, even though I’m grandfathered in at Blot’s $4/month rate.
1 Like
I argued against Wordpress earlier and now I’ll argue in favor of it: It’s not as difficult as all that, especially if you post 1x/day or less frequently. And it’s the most future-proof platform on the Internet.
Great tip - Pikapods look pretty straightforward to use - are there any downsides?
Not to throw a monkey wrench into the discussion, but there are currently some big goings-on in the WordPress development universe that would give me pause about using them:
Beyond that, WordPress’s status as one of the biggest blogging platforms means it is also one of the biggest targets for ne’er-do-wells. It thus requires much more maintenance and monitoring than the typical blogger can/wants to be doing.
I get the desire to save money and ditch subscriptions (I had a streaming service slaughter earlier this summer), but time is also money — trading a little money to save a considerable amount of time and effort seems worthwhile.
(Of course, if time is money, and money is the root of all evil, then by the transitive property time is also the root of all evil, but that’s a different conversation. 
3 Likes
Not that I’ve seen thus far, but I haven’t had a lot of time to explore just yet.
1 Like
Thanks for the caution. I have stepped back to reconsider. This may be an instance when it is worth spending the money versus the time and friction of moving to a new platform.
By the way, for what it is worth, money is not the root of all evil. The accurate statement is, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.”
1 Like
I think this (latest) WordPress drama is really only a drama if you’re on the WP Engine platform. It appears to be a petulant CEO versus “other party” scenario.
In this vein, I contend it’s much like SetApp changing their subscription pricing/model or BarTender changing hands “surreptitiously”. Which is to say, it’s really not the end of the world for the technology, merely a time to consider whether it’s meeting your needs.
To be clear, I ditched both SetApp and BarTender at the times of their respective dramas, but both continue on with many customers and no major issues. I just took the opportunity to ask myself “Is this valuable to me?” and the answer in both of those cases was no.
When it comes to WordPress, I have multiple sites on a managed server (I control WordPress) and nothing about this stoush concerns me for my own situation. Furthermore, the investment of time to move those sites to any other technology would be substantial. Conversely, in the many years I have been using WordPress (always self-hosted), it has improved in leaps and bounds. An argument between Mullenweg and one company isn’t nearly enough to upset my apple cart.
1 Like
This is also an interesting post about that:
2 Likes
I am having a quick look. It is a great idea and so far, it seems pretty straightforward.
1 Like
Intrigued. I’ll check this out. Thanks.
I tried switching from SquareSpace to Wordpress about a year ago, and after a year of absolutely hating the interface, I ended up returning to Squarespace. I’m not going to be trying to save a few bucks again, when all I have had is frustration as I cannot do many things that were easy before. I know I could have paid for a premium template but I want the freedom to be able to make changes templates without having to resort to code.
The final blow was when I couldn’t even make simple changes to the title bar without coding CSS, when the same thing is easy with Squarespace as it lets you drag and drop for the same feature.
1 Like