25 April 2022 Update: A lot has happened after this was made, and things are much better now. You can read about it here.
This isn’t what I was expecting my first post to be, but I’ve been buried under an impossible amount of new information far beyond the scope of comprehension for the last two weeks and I need some air.
It’s been two weeks since I first started.
The first week was spent reading about hosting providers. There were many, many reviews. Some were from blogs trying to make a profit from their affiliate links, others were from competitors writing biased articles against each other. There’s not a lot of useful information for laypeople like me who have no option but to take everyone’s word for it, which made differentiating between good and bad quality reviews a nightmare.
I eventually settled on a Managed WordPress Hosting provider called Nestify.io (not an affiliate link), but I’m having trouble with the payment options so I’m not sure what will happen after my trial ends. My experience with support so far has also been very slow, which doesn’t feel very encouraging given how much difficulty I’ve had trying to set everything up alone.
For now, I’ve given up on using a more professional email domain like feedback@sandboxthoughts.com (not working) because I can’t figure out how custom nameservers affects my ability to use the Google Workspace email I registered under my domain. The worst part about something not working is not the error message, but rather the lack of one. I’ve followed all the steps I could find, but “no error” and “everything is working” aren’t exactly the most helpful kinds of error messages. I could send emails from it; I just couldn’t receive any.
It’s been over a week since I first started, and at that point I was no longer mentally prepared to try and tackle more impossible problems for my current level of knowledge.
The next week: Privacy policy (and why I need a contact method)
The Privacy Policy is not one of the first things that comes to mind when writing a blog for the first time—at least, it wasn’t for me, but it turns out even enabling comments opens me to a lot of potential issues with user data, not to mention the addition of the various plugins and the information they collect. I don’t have the legal expertise to know what I need to declare according to the many regulations (GDPR et al.), nor the technical expertise to know exactly what I’m collecting due to not managing the servers myself and not having this site built entirely from scratch.
The Privacy Policy (as of 12 April 2022) is part default template and part copied from other websites. It’s the best I can produce with my current (lack of) legal and technical expertise, but I think being able to relatively safely enable comments is worth the effort. I do plan to update it eventually in future, maybe.
Anyway, one of the clauses give users the right to request for a copy of their data or for it to be deleted. There are a couple of buttons* in the admin panel that conveniently allow me to do that, assuming users are able to request for said copy of or deletion of their data in the first place, hence the contact method.
*Disclaimer: though at the time of writing this I have not tested these buttons yet, I can assure you I will press them if I need to.
The Theme for today is “Nightmares”
Now that I’ve found a host, written up a Privacy Policy (more or less) and set up a contact method, it was time to start designing my new house. To put the experience simply: this section’s title is not an exaggeration, I genuinely had nightmares from it.
I haven’t had much sleep for the last two weeks due to trying to set up this blog and cramming so much knowledge at the same time it was borderline mental abuse, and I thought finding a theme would be a nice, fun experience—a pleasant change of pace. It… was not. I will come back to this after I’ve collected my thoughts.
I am writing this only just after finishing the theme, and my thoughts are hiding like their village has just been attacked by an enemy in the middle of the night.
The first impression?
As this is may be the first post you read here, I hope this gives you an idea of what to expect from this blog—at least with regards to my writing style. There will be a dedicated post (yep post, not page) in future where I try and describe what I’m like and what I plan to write about. Rest assured, it will be very long; people love talking about themselves, after all.
Thanks for reading!