March will mark eight whole years of blogging for me. EIGHT. YEARS.

I started The Active Spirit (TAS) as a creative outlet (more details in this post), and now it feels more like an online journal than a creative hideaway. The hobby took off as an actual career for many people in the mid-2010s, and everyone left blogger/blogspot for the likes of Wordpress and Squarespace. I'm still here hanging out on Blogger, and I have no plans to leave any time soon. Here's why:

Ease of Use

Blogger is connected to all my Google accounts. I don't need a special login to access my page, and it's connected to my Google photo library which makes it even easier to share pictures here. Also, in eight years and over 500 posts, I have yet to run out of cloud storage space.

It's Free

This is a hobby for me, not a career path. I am not a professional blogger by any means. While I have paid money to invest in TAS (templates, photo editing software, etc.), I do not see the point in paying a monthly/yearly fee to actually use a blogging platform.

Cheap Domains & Custom Email

One of the things I really cared about when I first started blogging was having my own domain. I didn't want ".blogspot" in my URL. Purchasing a domain made me feel like I was taking more ownership of my site and my content. For $10 a year I get a custom domain and a custom email address that I can use for all blog communication. I like keeping those kinds of messages separate from my personal email address. If everything was in one place in my inbox, it would feel cluttered, and I'd be far less likely to respond to messages.

Porting Content is Tedious

I'd be lying if I said I never thought about switching to another platform. Squarespace is very enticing with their simple templates and drag-and-drop layouts. It would be nice to design this site myself instead of paying a designer each time I want to give this space a facelift. But then what about all my old posts? And the old comments on those posts? I definitely don't want to lose them, but the idea of transferring years worth of content sounds tedious at best and expensive at worst. No and thank you.

Nobody Cares What Platform You Use

At the end of the day, people read blogs for a variety of reasons - none of which are the hosting platform. I've never clicked on someone's blog and clicked away because it was on a certain platform. If the content is engaging, if the pictures draw me in, if the writer's voice shines through, I'm staying around and clicking all over the place! Nobody really cares what site I use to publish my content, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

photo source »»