Squarespace

For many years, this blog was a self-hosted WordPress affair. In large part due to my long history with the platform and my continued commercial work on top of this unique open source offering. However, I stopped developing websites on this platform for a living, and during the last year or more I have found myself second guessing the choice for many reasons. The biggest of all being the fact that innovation on it slowed, quite a bit.

As time has passed, my knowledge has expanded. I've found myself working with cutting-edge javascript libraries and frameworks for a living, admiring fully-hosted platforms innovating in many ways.

I have recommended Squarespace to many, mainly due to the fact that there is little reason for anyone to have to worry about managing hosting, keeping a CMS up to date, and hiring anyone to implement stupid simple designs. This is the future, this stuff should be dead simple.

And the thing is that it is.

Companies offering fully-hosted solutions are solving most of the upfront problems any single person would have when starting a site. How many times would a focused, managed solution be the better option for someone looking to hire a developer to build stuff from scratch?.

It's certainly hard to argue for a commercial solution versus an open source project, but that argument becomes easier when you focus on the ultimate goal.

Typepad has been around for a long time and they have been in the commercial model from the start.

My move over to Squarespace should come as no surprise by now. These guys have thought things through. 

For the first time ever, I have not touched a single line of code to bring this to life, and it feels great.

You know what else feels great? The fact I'm paying for the service. 

I have plenty of respect for WordPress –and all other open source platforms out there I could have moved to– but my respect for Squarespace and the team behind it, coupled with the huge advantages it is offering me, far outpaced whatever WordPress could have done for this dead simple blog in the future.