Earlier this year, I took a look at the options for hosting a blog in 2015. I ended up settling on Tumblr, tweeting:

Been playing around with setting up a blog with a custom domain and theme for the past few weeks. Tumblr was BY FAR the easiest.

— Peter Zignego (@pvzig) April 16, 2015

Tumblr was always a weird place to host a blog in the traditional sense of the word. I had settled on it because I found their custom theme implementation far simpler than anything else out there. And it’s hard to beat free! But Tumblr is more a social network than a blogging platform - they introduced messaging in November. It began to feel like I was having to fight harder and harder against the interface - avoiding reblogs, likes, usernames. So when I visited my site on my iPhone a few days ago and was greeted with a floating banner promoting the tumblr app, I knew it was time for a change.

I had been tangentially aware of Realmac Software’s new crowd-funded blogging platform, Typed.com. So when Dan Counsell tweeted about rolling out beta access to theme support, I took the plunge.

A few hours later, I had my transferred my layout, added my old posts, and switched over my domain.

Things I Liked:

• Full customization - there’s no required boilerplate.
• The sample theme provides a good jumping off point.
• Simplicity. If you know basic CSS and HTML, you should have no problem customizing your blog to your liking with the help of the documentation.
• The Theme Preview.app makes it easy to perfect your theme locally.
• Markdown and raw HTML support.
• The ability to backdate posts. This allowed me to bring over my existing posts with their existing post dates.
• Post tagging support.

Things I Disliked:

• No ability to preview a post before publishing it.
• No post import. You have to bring your posts over one by one using the editor.
• You have to enter a credit card number to sign up for the 'free trial'. On the Typed.com home page, they explain it like this:

To ensure your Typed website remains accessible to readers at the end of your trial, we require a credit card to start one.

This is cheesy explanation for what is a customer hostile business decision, plain and simple. When you require a credit card to sign up for your free trial, you’ve already got me questioning your intentions - don’t exacerbate it by trying to bullshit me on why.

Would I recommend Typed? That’s a hard question to answer. A recurring subscription is a hard sell for something with a lot of free alternatives out there. If you’re willing to deal with a few annoyances, you could use Tumblr for free like I was. If you don't need or want to control the design of your blog, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Medium - I’ve been cross posting my blog posts there and find the experience to be excellent. But if you're serious about having a good old-fashioned blog, Typed provides a great experience for a reasonable price.