Hosted on Google Sites

This website has had many guises and, if I'm honest, I've lost plenty of posts on the way. I've tried hosted services like Tumblr, paid services like Squarespace and created my own hosting on a Raspberry Pi with Wordpress and Ghost.

I've come to the conclusion that it's all too easy to get wrapped up in the tech than actually writing anything. The latest iteration was a Wordpress site on a Pi and it worked well, thanks to a fixed IP address from my ISP. It worked fine but I did have an issue with a contact form. I've fixed this before using SMTP via my Gmail account, but this time, my site had a sub-domain that I had already set up with a contact form. It was probably ok, but the credentials failed when used on a separate site and it was all getting a bit weary.

All that to say, I just needed to move to something easier to manage. Self-hosting is a great means for a cheap and flexible solution. I have also learnt a lot in process, but ultimately I just need to find something that doesn't need a lot of constant monitoring.

Given that I now route all my email through Gmail (don't judge), I decided to settle on Google Sites. It's not terribly customisable but I can have a series of sites as sub-domains and I've got that working with Cloudlfare, so I'm happy, until Google kill the service off!