Trying to Decide What My Site Should Be..

I've wanted to blog regularly for several years now, but never kept it up. I also haven't found a platform that I felt would encompass what I wanted to accomplish. I've wanted to be able to publish content to the different buckets of people that I know:

  • General Friends/Family - This group can be broken down into friends that share different interests of mine - Tech, sports, then anything else

  • Professional Connections - Co-workers, people I currently know through "professional" events, and people I hope to meet/connect with later on.

I also wanted to blog about a lot of different things:

  • Basketball

  • Tech/Programming

  • Random life thoughts

  • Life in city/community I was currently living in

A typical blog isn't really suitable for all of these needs. One reasons I really like Google+ (my profile) is that I can reshare something, post 1 sentence, 5 paragraphs, or just a link about any of the above subjects, and choose which people will see what. Unfortunately there is a grand total of 2 people that I know personally that use it.

Instead, I chose to use Ghost as the platform for my site. It's a blogging platform but I'm hoping I can add normal content on here as well. It still doesn't solve the aforementioned problems, but I've been putting this off for several years so I needed to pick something.

I mostly chose Ghost because it's built on Node.js and is open-source so I can learn a little back-end Javascript. Also it's relatively new so hopefully there will be some opportunities to create plugins and contribute to the GitHub repo.

I think I want to have 4 areas of my site:

  1. Typical "long-form" blog posts. I'll aim to keep everything at a readable level, maybe <500 words because I'm pretty verbose. Gotta work on that.

  2. "Short-form" content like something I'd post on social media. I may just create a feed page that pulls all of my social media updates?

  3. A web version of an email newsletter that I want to start sending out. It'll just be a ~monthly curated list of websites with a few things written about them.

  4. Portfolio section of some sort, showcasing my web development creations, even the ones that are rough around the edges.