Blogging

Our blog is over ten years old. When I started it, I hoped it would be interactive—you know, with lots of comments and back-and-forth conversations. That never happened. Most posts never get any comments. With over 6,500 posts, we have less than 8,000 comments. About half of them are replies from Mrs. Lion or me. Is it that our posts are offputting? We have lots of readers but very little interaction.

Similar blogs get large numbers of responses; we don’t. I’ve been considering turning off comments entirely and resigning myself to writing an online magazine. The problem with silent readers is that we miss out on a lot of potential topics for future posts.

We know that we have loyal readers. Our site consistently draws a large audience. Our blog is part of the Google AI database. We rank in the top half of the sources used. It surprised me that any sex bloggers were included. I’m not whining about this situation. I’m genuinely confused. Both Mrs. Lion and I have equally bad luck attracting comments. This is true even when our posts are controversial.

Is this a problem with our site layout? Comments are only visible if each post is selected individually. If you just type our URL, you don’t see comments. If you click on the title of a post, you get comments. That’s true on almost every other blog. I don’t think that’s it.

After a decade of nearly no reader response, I’m ready to give up and turn off comments entirely. Mrs. Lion and I are also growing less motivated to post. Blogs tend to die in a decade or less. We’ve decided to keep posting. How much we write and what we write about can be influenced by you, our reader. If you interact with us, things happen. If you don’t, we lose interest. There’s nothing in this for us beyond the satisfaction of sharing.

We

Most blogs, ours included, count other bloggers as some of our most faithful readers. It’s a sort of secret fraternity/sorority in that we rarely identify ourselves to other bloggers. The exception to this is when our little community is under attack. About ten years ago, Google, the owner of Blogger.com, notified sex bloggers that they would no longer permit their content. Fortunately, Google relented to the wave of protests and welcomes sexual content.

The largest blog host is WordPress.com. WordPress is also the leading blogging software. The software is free and not subject to any form of censorship. WordPress.com is the commercial side of the company. The blogging software is free. You can get a small blog for free from WordPress.com. Larger blogs with more features cost money. Unfortunately, the people at WordPress.com are sex nazis. They will shut down any blog with “explicit” sexual content. Our blog is not welcome there. The nazis even kill paying customers if they shop a penis or a vagina.

The nazis also sell a WordPress plugin called Jetpack. This software offers backups, scans, improved commenting, and other nice additions to a WordPress blog. About a month ago I received an email telling me that unless I removed explicit sexual content, my subscription to Jetpack would be canceled. I chose to delete Jetpack and replace it with other free plugins.

Most bloggers aren’t very technical and would have a lot of trouble building a website on their own. So they knuckle under to the sex nazis at WordPress.com. I am deeply disturbed by censorship. I don’t think kiddie porn or other illegal content has a place on the Web, but beyond that I believe anything else has a right to exist. Sexual content is certainly free speech and protected under the US Constitution.

Sadly, most bloggers don’t realize that the technical bar is very low if they want to blog without censorship. Google WordPress hosting, and you will find a ton of reasonably priced vendors who will give you a turnkey WordPress site at a low cost without nazi censorship. If you are willing to use your search engine to help you learn some Linux basics, you can self-host in the cloud free from the nazi bastards at WordPress.com.

I’m very surprised that WordPress.com is populated by nazis. It makes no sense. Does their personnel department look for sexually repressed Republicans? It absolutely amazes me. In the past, I’ve had to ask some plugin providers for help implementing their products. They needed access to our site to help me. Without exception, they were happy with our content. Only the WordPress.com nazis were offended.

Fortunately, we don’t have to allow the nazi censors to redact sex from our world. If you are a blogger, you have options. If you need help, let me know.

Every so often, someone asks me how we manage our blog. It’s tempting to want to express yourself on the Internet. Blogging is a fun way to do that. If you want to create a sexually oriented blog, there are some issues to consider. There are two major providers of free blogs: blogger.com and wordpress.com. Both offer free, easy-to-setup blogging websites. WordPress.com prohibits sexual material and is very efficient at shutting blogs off without warning. Blogger does allow most sexual content. However, you will get a warning page in front of your site. Google owns Blogger and has threatened to shut down sexual sites in the past. They changed their minds and decided to allow them.

Our site is set up on a private Internet service provider (ISP). We pay for a shared server in the cloud. We got the necessary base software installed as part of the server. We had to set up and add other software we might need. The way we did it requires some knowledge of Linux administration and other technical skills. Given the size of our site, it was the only affordable way to go. More on our techy stuff at the end of this post.

There are many independent pay-to-play ISPs out there. Their services range in price from about five bucks a month up to, well, a lot. I’ve worked with two. Both offer good service at fair prices. For the record, I don’t get any money from either for suggesting their offerings.

The simplest to use and one of the cheapest is EasyWP on https://www.namecheap.com. I’ve been working with this company for many years. They are one of the world’s largest domain registrars and offer some nice additional services. One is EasyWP. EasyWP Turbo is only $68 for the first year and less than $100/year after that. The price includes unlimited bandwidth, free software installation, and 24/7 customer support. They have a cheaper tier, but it requires you to buy an SSL certificate (needed to do the “https:” instead of “http:”). It’s robust enough to handle a pretty busy blog. We used this service for a while.

The other ISP I’ve used is Hostgator.com. They are one of the largest web-hosting ISPs in the world. Their starter WordPress package is $5.95/month for the first three years (paid in advance). It goes way up after that. I’ve used them for vanilla blogs. I have no idea about whether or not they care about your content. They also offer very good tech support.

There are hundreds of other ISPs. I have used a couple I didn’t like. If you build a WordPress blog, there are excellent migration plugins available. Moving from one ISP to another is fairly simple and painless. It’s easy to move when the sale price period is over. Also, register your domain name even if you use Blogger or the free WordPress service. If you don’t, someone else might.

How our site works

This site lives in the AWS cloud. We are on an EC2 WordPress instance. Unlike Hostgator and Namecheap, we have full control of our virtual server. Our instance is 2 CPUs with 4GB ram and 80 GB solid state disk. We have installed database caching software and plugin (Redis) to support our site. We also run Matomo web statistics.

Our site is served via the AWS Cloudfront CDN (Content Delivery Network). This consists of more than 70 servers around the world that deliver our content to visitors. That’s free. This setup requires lots of reading and tinkering. There is some command line work installing and maintaining the non-WordPress software. It’s more expensive than Namechap or HostGator but a lot more powerful.

I don’t spend a ton of time managing our system. It took a while to set up. I just finished migrating to a different technical architecture on AWS. It wasn’t terribly hard to do, just lots of reading and finicky steps. We will save a few bucks a month with the new arrangement. Performance seems a little better too.