Why I chose Squarespace for this blog

One of my favorite parts of Miami Beach: the Miami Beach botanical garden.

The best tool for the job is the one that you use and works.

I used to have a version of this blog hosted on Wordpress. I loved the fact that I could customize it the way that I wanted, had full control over hosting, settings, plugins, etc. I mostly shared links that I liked around music, articles, videos, etc. It was kind of like mini blog passing itself as a life stream (not unlike how people use X or Threads). I was pretty active on it but then I stopped posting. Updating Wordpress plugins all the time got really cumbersome.

I know things may have changed but as I’ve gotten more mature, I’ve come to value the right options at the right time. I use Squarespace for my portfolio and mostly like it. After the version 7.1 update, I can’t switch themes which is annoying but in all honesty, I don’t really care that much. They say it’s because you can customize it to look like any of the themes since they use more of a block drag-and-drop mechanism for allowing users to build their sites.

I didn’t want to use Medium or some other platform because I wasn’t really interested in “building an audience.” Like if it happens, great. But the point of this blog is for me to have fun, share pictures (the picture of the botanical garden has literally nothing to do with this post and that’s exactly what I want), explore ideas, etc. And at the risk of sounding like I’m doing advertising for Squarespace, I just want something familiar that I can use easily and that will make it so I post regularly.

I like this theme because the “home” landing page has different orientation for images and I really like that. Also, I just want to be able to dump pictures and Squarespace has a lot of ways of organizing images and videos. I like that I can add videos, that it works in mobile out of the box, that I can still customize and that the controls are nice. The contextual menus appear as you click through the various sections. You can move things around, you have undos, you have control over formatting. Do other tools offer the same? Yeah. But this one feels right for me today. And if I need to leave for some reason, they have an export functionality.

I just like that it does what I need it to do, I don’t need to worry about hosting, I can grow with it if I need to… but most importantly, in its simplicity, I am finding joy and this feeling of wanting to update my blog as a labor of love and as a creative process. I spend all day creating for others and now I’m getting to create for myself. And I think that’s pretty cool.