Growing My Own Garden: The Joy of Blogging on WordPress

This post was automatically translated by AI from the Japanese original.

I’ve been writing and sharing on WordPress for a long time now.

It started because I wanted to keep what I thought and learned in a form I could look back on later.

I was never naturally good at writing.
At first, a single post took me hours, and it sometimes felt like a chore.
But I’ve gotten used to it by now.

Besides this blog, I also keep a private one. These days I can’t imagine life without a blog.

I get bored easily, so I’m surprised I’ve kept it up this long.

Looking for a place to express myself, I tried X, Instagram, Facebook, Ameblo (a Japanese free blog service), Hatena Blog, and note (a Japanese publishing platform), all of them.
I still use a few of them, but the place that suited me best for my own writing was WordPress.

📖 Using Ameblo and WordPress together (in Japanese)

In this post, I’d like to share what’s good about WordPress with anyone who wants to record the things they love, and express them in a world they like.

Posts just keep flowing in on social media.
Posts from people you follow, posts the platform picks and pushes at you.
And you can see the numbers too: how many likes and reposts each post got, how many followers each person has.

For me, seeing “too much of what other people are doing” is a bit tiring.

I started sharing because I wanted to express myself, yet I’d find myself worrying about the reactions to what I posted.
And I’d get anxious about the pace, wondering if I should be posting more.

Since social media is a network, I think it’s a tool for people who enjoy following each other, commenting, and talking with all kinds of people.

For me, I could post in bursts when the mood struck, but then I’d end up wanting to step away partway through.

I think social media suits people who:

find it easier to build things up when others are watching
don’t mind whether they get reactions or not

I disliked the limits of free blogs#

What I disliked about free blogs was ads showing up without my say.

Of course, the companies that offer free blogs are businesses too, and they have to make money somewhere. Since we’re using it for free, I think ads are unavoidable.

But the places where ads appear keep increasing year by year 💦
I remember it used to be just a small banner under the title or below the post.

These days, ads can take up about half of a phone screen, or you have to tap to close an ad before you even get to the main content, and I started to feel I spent more time being “made to look at” things I’m not interested in than looking at the content I wanted to see.

If that’s the case, I’d much rather pay about 1,000 yen a month and have my own place without ads.

📖 How to move from a free blog to WordPress (in Japanese)

The format of your posts is also decided by the platform: text for a free blog, video for YouTube, mostly images for Instagram.
Tags get shared with other people’s posts, not just your own.
Words in your text can get links added automatically.

Each service had its pros and cons.

Each company also sets rules about content you can’t post. (For example, you may not be allowed to use it for sales purposes.)

And above all, you never know how long the company will keep running the service. If it shuts down, all the content you’ve built up and the connections with your readers could disappear in an instant. (Moving content to another service once it’s made is very hard.)

On “borrowed gardens” run by other companies, like social media and free blogs, I always felt a little cramped.

WordPress feels like “my own garden”#

Organize as I like, build up as I like#

I kept looking for a way of sharing that suited me, trying free blogs and social media and quitting again and again.
The only one that lasted a long time was WordPress.

That’s because WordPress was “my own garden”, where I could share freely without worrying about anyone.
There are costs for a place to put the blog, such as a server and a domain, but the software itself is free.

The name and the URL.
The design and the layout.
I can decide everything myself.
No ads get in the way.
Long posts are easy to read. (Short ones are fine too.)

I can include lots of pictures, or none at all.

Once I started, I was able to keep going casually, at my own pace.

And I love the feeling of what I’ve written piling up.
Social media posts easily get buried under other people’s posts, but blog posts steadily accumulate.

It’s my own place, so I can do as I like.
Making the design and layout is fun, like rearranging a room ♪
I’m also happy that I can organize things by adding categories and linking posts together.

And the more time and effort I put in, the more attached I become to it as my own place.

Looking back at posts I wrote in the past, I think “so that’s what I was thinking back then”, and it’s helped me more than anything.

A blog is sometimes called the “mothership of your life”, and as you keep going, it feels like you end up with a truly original book full of your own journey.

Meeting people who resonate#

When you keep sharing on WordPress, strangely enough, people who resonate with you gather naturally. Because it’s something I love and put my heart into, I meet people who connect with it deeply.

Thanks to that, the people who found me through my website and reached out feel like kindred spirits from the start.

People who are genuinely interested in my world, even if there are only a few.
Isn’t that kind of high-quality connection what’s truly valuable?

Protect my own place, and grow it as I like#

It may be a hassle at first, it’s true.
There are initial and running costs.
You can’t just create an account and post right away. (Then again, social media has added so many features lately that even getting to your first post can be hard.)

But whichever service or tool you choose, you need to learn how to use it at first.
In the end it’s just a tool, so the more you use it, the more used to it you get.

I recommend WordPress especially to people who are particular about how things look and feel.
It has a freedom you don’t get on borrowed platforms.

Having a place where you can do as you please means having a place where you can carefully grow what you love and your own world.
And it means enjoying the process of growing it, too.

Won’t you bloom some flowers in a garden of your own?