Why I built my own blogging platform (No Wordpress please)

I'm not new to blogging, I do have my old blog still around (mostly until fall of 2026). This started as a side project long time ago, which didn't get much traction since I was only concerned about writing the text.

Over the years, I realized that nothing is ever enough in the online world. When I noticed that the website doesn't get much traffic, I tried to learn more about SEO, since it was the only way I could acquire traffic...

Could you ever say you know SEO?

You know what they say, that the more you learn the more you realize that you don't really know that much? I can tell you it's super true with SEO. When I started, I just dived in by using some tools which build a SEO score. Although I could improve my posts a lot, there were some things I simply couldn't do due to Wordpress.

Wordpress has the knack of over-complicating the links, the sitemaps are a total mess, the site structure is filled with lots of unnecessary code etc.

AFIEther has quite a good SEO score, compared to the old Wordpress site.

Plugins to the "rescue"

The good thing about Wordpress is that it's highly customizable through plugins and you can basically find anything you need. There are downsides of these plugins that made me reconsider:

1. The more plugins you install, the slower your Wordpress instance will be
2. Many plugins introduce vulnerabilities which attackers may exploit and you can lose website access, data, everything
3. If you install 2 or more plugins for similar duties, they may collide or cancel one another
4. This one is a major turn off 👎 for me: all of the plugins are very commercial! Basic features are free, if you want more you pay tons of cash. Personally, I don't like the idea of paying money upfront for something which doesn't produce me money beforehand

What could I do as a Software Engineer

First of all, I tried to trace the problem. It seemed that for many simple tasks, Wordpress was just too much bloatware. I hated the Blocks Editor a lot, very slow and didn't need many of the features. I didn't find any Newsletter plugin to satisfy my needs. At some point, I just couldn't improve the SEO score in any way, maybe by just writing my own plugins.

But hey, I'm a Software Engineer, if I am to write my own plugins, why shouldn't I write the whole website from scratch, tailored to my needs? Said and not done yet, still work in progress. I started 2 years ago and I still work on it.

Where I stand now

It took me quite a lot of time to get when I am today with this AFIEther website. I still need to give it a clearer direction, but my biggest issue is the full time job, which has proved to be very stressful in the last 2-3 years. Sometimes I can barely concentrate on this website after finishing up with my regular full time job!

But spite of all this, I do have quite some features for my own needs integrated and fully developed by me in this website:

1. The newsletter is fully functional. It works in 2 ways: you can subscribe with your name and email. For this you also complete the captcha verification. Then you'll receive a confirmation email with a link, when you click it you are confirmed and fully subscribed. Or, easier, you can do it by using the Facebook method. You just need to login in your Facebook account and authorize the app that I built to get your name and email. That's it! No other info is shared and you don't need to click any verification link!
2. A grotesque blog post editor with HTML enabled by Quill library: I don't need the full block thingie that Wordpress provides, just something simple and useful to write my blog post. In addition, I have attachments functions which help me include pictures, showcases and thumbnails. A blog can be also scheduled to be posted sometime in the future or published now. Besides being able to edit fields like title, excerpt, slug or meta description, I also have a sort of rendering engine which helps me to generate thumbnail pictures for the website and also for YouTube, Instagram posts and stories.
3. Speaking of posts, I developed (with hard work) my own system to automatically publish my posts on major platforms like Insgram, Facebook or LinkedIn. See my links page for details.
4. If I publish a video on my YouTube channel, I can also embed it very easily into my blog post. Check this post for instance, you may notice it has a YouTube icon.
5. My very own views gathering. Practically, every blog post view is tracked every 20 minutes and you'll see at the bottom the counter
6. More than that, any user can submit a feedback by clicking on one of the 3 icons at the bottom (Like, Love or Can Improve). You can also leave a custom message and submit!

Leveraged all the expertise I gathered in 15+ years

Coding all of this wouldn't have been possible without the expertise I gathered in my last 15 years of experience. Think about the backend, frontend, databases, pipelines etc. that I needed to handle. It was quite a tremendous task to do.

Do you think hosting was the least part of the problem? Not at all, the way I built it, I just cannot host it on a regular Apache/PHP/MySQL server. It requires more than that, so I partnered with Vultr to help me keep my project alive and secure on their world-class servers. By the way, there is a nice offer I have for you if you want to try out their services, see below!

Where to now?

There are a lot of features implemented under the hood. I have in plan to develop more comprehensive widgets for affiliate links and maybe a comments system. I'd like to develop a carousel feature for Instagram. I need to focus on changing the categories a bit plus an overhaul of the home page which is a disaster as of now.

Wish me a lot of focus and energy to accomplish this, it should bring a lot of value to you as well. Did I also tell you about my Twitch integration plans? Hehe, in my next article for sure!

Having any feedback, don't forget to add it below. For any questions, don't hesitate to contact me! Cheers!