< ♜

Building on the web in 2025

Key takeaways:

  • Always a good exercise to better understand the limitations of the open web and the tools that foster creation on it.
  • Wordpress is still a great option for those who want to worry about the technology as little as possible. It is pretty affordable these days, too.
  • My father is a good writer and orator, so helping him to craft a space where he can speak his mind (while sticking it to social media) was surprisingly rewarding.
  • Check out the outcomes of this project at https://tongueonfire.com.

About two weeks ago, it came to my attention that my (pastor/writer/author) father was still using a *.wordpress.com blog for his writing. As he approaches retirement, he wants to spend his freed time writing, but is taking a stand against Meta and no longer posting his thoughts on Facebook. Instead, he is returning to an old blog space that he has periodically used for longer-form writing. Unfortunately, that space needed/needs a lot of work to become a place on the web for people to go for his writings.

The initial question that started this whole process was something akin to "what social network should I move to if I am trying to get off Meta platforms?" The onus for this was the notion that Meta's conduct with the current administration showed them to be more despicable, enough so that my father was done propping up their business behaviors by lending his words to the algorithm. In particular, the straw for my father was Facebook's denunciation of DEI programs and stepping back their content moderation to kowtow to an administration that stands in opposition to everything my father and his church (https://kimballavenuechurch.org) have worked tirelessly to protect.

Nevertheless, the question ("what social...") was the wrong one. In this day and age, one must approach these situations with a goal in mind: "what are you trying to accomplish with your writing, Dad?" An age-old question for my site as well, if there ever was one. But it isn't just that one question; there are a number of guiding questions I posed and action items I built out of the conversation that ensued. I didn't want him to go down a social network rabbit hole that he didn't need to traverse if the point of the writing was to write and not necessarily to engage in social media. It also isn't about creating a brand—my father couldn't care less about such things—as much as it is about reach. The best way to reach an audience is to write and publish.

Taking Action

The first thing I started doing to assist, aside from having a impassioned back and forth about the merits of building a daily writing habit, was building a set of approachable action items for him to start working through.

As an aside and a bit of background, my father has spent his entire career as a pastor, but I got my sea legs in computing because of him. He had a computer in his office for almost as long as I can remember, mostly for word processing. I remember playing with the command line, dot matrix printing, and reading books about HTML and the web when it was just starting to reach the general public. While "allowed" would be too strong a word in this context, I happened to make mistakes that taught me a lot about what technology was all about and I count those experiences among the reasons I am a technologist today.

With that aside in mind, I trust that my father can handle himself on the web. Below is a sampling of the action items I tasked him with (simplified for privacy and brevity):

  • Pay for Wordpress
  • Register tongueonfire.com
  • Update site icon and Wordpress author avatar
  • Inventory your writing
  • Get the word out
  • Start writing daily (at least 15 minutes)
  • Create about/biography page
  • Start using tags or pages for content differentiation
  • Collect profiles from around the Internet
  • Build out your archive

The key to keep in mind here is that Pastor Bruce Ray has been writing for decades. I counted nine separate web spaces that include some of his writing (some with hundreds of blog posts) and that doesn't include all the handwritten or locally saved items from over the years; these resources need to be reviewed and consolidated with a byline and a renewed purpose. What he needed to be reminded of is the idea that those old writings (the archive I mentioned above) are still just as valuable now as they were when he first wrote them because they show the journey.

It is important now as he approaches retirement to collect those resources that otherwise have no value in their disparate forms into a cohesive presence on the web. So too, if he plans to separate himself from the day-to-day operations of the church in retirement, he should gather these things now before he hands the reigns over to the next generation of leadership, who plausibly will not recognize the value or prioritize these items as much as he or others might.

Tongue on Fire is going to be a work in progress for awhile, but I am glad that it is starting fresh with a purpose in mind.