As It Happens

Life isn’t always made up of grand moments. Sometimes it’s a street you got lost on during a trip, a hobby you keep coming back to, or something small that happened on an ordinary day and somehow stayed with you. This page is where I share my travels, everyday observations, memories, and the things I enjoy — without any filter or grand narrative. No big claims here; just lived experiences.

English

  • Why You Should Still Start a Personal Blog

    The personal blog may feel like a relic. Visual media is everywhere, attention spans are shrinking, and the entire internet seems optimized for fast, disposable content. Yet one thing will never disappear: human creativity. No AI will replace our creative nature anytime soon — not because the technology isn’t impressive, but because it’s built on imitation. It consumes what we’ve already made, iterates on it, and returns a blurry composite. The more it generates, the muddier the output becomes.

    So what’s the alternative? Publishing on social media feels like the obvious answer, but it comes with invisible walls. Platforms sort us into categories, and those categories have unspoken rules. Post something that doesn’t fit the mold and it feels out of place — even cringe. The algorithm decides who you are before you get the chance to.

    A personal website sidesteps all of that. It’s yours. No algorithm, no audience expectations, no category to fit into.

    So how do you build one?

    There are plenty of options — page builders, hosted platforms, static site generators — each with its own trade-offs. But when it comes to blogging specifically, WordPress consistently rises to the top. Its simplicity is hard to beat, and the ecosystem around it is massive. That said, there are things nobody tells you before you dive in.

    The dark side of WordPress

    You’ll find no shortage of glowing reviews, but the frustrations tend to get buried. The first thing to understand is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org — and they’re more different than they sound.

    Think of dot com as an all-in-one package: hosting, domain, and the platform itself are bundled together. It’s convenient, but that convenience comes at a price. Dot org, on the other hand, is the open-source software you install yourself — you bring your own hosting and domain, which gives you far more control but requires a bit more setup.

    Which one should you choose?

    • WordPress.com — If setup and maintenance feel daunting and you’d rather just write, this works. It can get expensive quickly, though.
    • WordPress.org — If you want full control over your site with flexible pricing, go this route. It takes more effort upfront, but you’re not locked into anyone’s pricing model.

    WordPress itself offers clean, functional themes. The real trouble starts when you discover plugins. Every feature you might want — contact forms, SEO tools, backups, performance optimizers — exists as a plugin. And almost every plugin follows the same pattern: a free version that does just enough to make you want more, and a paid version conveniently waiting behind the next feature you need.

    On WordPress.com, this is compounded by the platform’s subscription tiers. Want to use plugins at all? That’ll be a professional plan. The product is quietly designed to push you toward spending more. On WordPress.org you can install any plugin freely, but you’ll still run headfirst into the same freemium walls — just without the platform upsell layered on top.

    It’s not a great situation. But after looking at the alternatives, WordPress still comes out ahead for anyone serious about running a personal blog. Google’s Blogger remains an option — if a mid-2000s aesthetic doesn’t bother you. For everything else, you’re mostly back where you started.

    Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.

    John Kenneth Galbraith

    It’s funny when you think about it..

  • Hello World!

    It has long been my intention to start a blog — partly to fulfil a need for expression, and partly to keep myself engaged in small personal projects. In these times, human motivation often requires some external push, especially as technology, for all its convenience, has a way of making us more passive. Perhaps “the curse of technology” is not too strong a phrase after all.1

    Before outlining the blog’s goals, I should say something about my own. I created this platform primarily to sharpen my engineering knowledge and English writing skills, while gradually building an audience whose engagement will keep me accountable. In the longer term, I intend to compile the posts published here into a book.

    The blog’s main goal is to bring together a niche group of people to discuss and debate topics across civil engineering, finance, philosophy, and everyday life — functioning as a non-profit hub for the open exchange of knowledge.

    Will it succeed? Most likely not. Yet it is always better to try than to do nothing at all. Time passes regardless.

    This is not my first attempt. Over the years I have tried Blogger and WordPress on more than one occasion, each time abandoning the project before it truly began. This time feels different — though only time will tell.

    This is not my first attempt at a website like this. Over the years I have started on Blogger and WordPress more than once — each time abandoning it before things ever got off the ground. Perhaps it was a lack of motivation, perhaps simply the wrong timing. This time, I have a feeling things will be different. But that is easy to say; in the end, only time will tell.

    1. The funny part is that this paragraph was revised by AI. ↩︎