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Coffee with Kevin: Weekly Reflections on Life, Work, and Everything Else

Saturday mornings hit differently. The pace slows down, the coffee stays hot a little longer, and there is finally time to reflect instead of just keeping up with the week.

Welcome to Coffee with Kevin—my weekly space to step away from news headlines, charts, and rankings to share personal stories, practical lessons, and observations.

Some weeks, we’ll explore life in retirement, living in Brazil, photography, books, or family. Other weeks, I’ll draw on four decades in technology, leadership, and change management—offering perspectives that remain relevant long after leaving the office.

Think of this as two friends catching up over a fresh cup of coffee: honest conversation, stories worth sharing, and an idea or two to take with you into your weekend.

Grab your cup, settle in, and let’s dive into this week’s conversation: Learning

I Built Another Blog. Because Apparently One Wasn’t Enough.

I built another blog.

Yes, another one.

And before you ask, no, I’m not abandoning this one.

This time I decided to see what happens when you build a blog outside of WordPress.

The new site is an independent blog hosted on GitHub. There is no WordPress installation, no WordPress theme, and no collection of plugins quietly waiting for the next update to cause me grief.

So why did I do it?

It started with a ridiculously simple Google search:

Where do blogs get hosted besides WordPress or Blogger?

I knew about Wix, but I always thought of that more as a website-building platform. I also knew WordPress was one of the biggest blogging ecosystems around.

What I hadn’t really considered was that you could simply build a blog yourself.

That led to the obvious next question:

How?

And that’s where things got interesting.

I started asking ChatGPT questions, digging into GitHub, learning more about static websites, HTML, CSS, hosting, SEO, and all the other pieces involved.

What I thought might be a small weekend project turned into roughly 40 hours of work.

Because apparently I don’t know how to leave well enough alone.

Fortunately, I wasn’t starting completely from scratch. I’ve worked with source-control tools for decades and had used Git before, so GitHub wasn’t completely foreign territory.

Once I understood how the pieces fit together, the project became genuinely fun.

I’ve learned a lot about HTML and CSS. I’ve learned more about Git and GitHub. More importantly, I’m learning what actually happens behind the scenes when you build a website rather than simply using a platform that does it for you.

And I’m still learning.

Why Build Something Independent?

Part of this came from some of my frustrations with WordPress.

I like WordPress. I’m keeping it.

But there are things that have occasionally driven me a little crazy.

Getting access to all of my statistics isn’t always as easy as I’d like. Google Analytics provides useful information, but it doesn’t necessarily give me everything I’d like to know.

The WordPress Reader can also be a little mysterious. Even when I look at the “Recent” section, the results don’t always seem particularly recent.

And then there are plugins.

Plugins are wonderful right up until one of them decides that today is the day it would like to rearrange the furniture.

So I started wondering what it would be like to control everything myself.

The files.

The design.

The code.

The content.

The SEO.

The hosting.

The whole thing.

That is the real attraction of an independent blog.

You give up some of the convenience of a platform, but you gain a tremendous amount of control.

And, perhaps more importantly for me, I get to learn how it all works.

I’m Not Replacing WordPress

I’m actually doing the opposite.

I’m keeping this blog and using the new site as an experiment.

I’ve already created a lot of content here, so I’m going to recycle some of it on the independent site. Some posts will be similar or identical. Others will be original.

Then I’ll watch what happens.

Can I generate traffic without a built-in blogging ecosystem?

Can I get Google to find the site?

Can I use SEO effectively?

Can I build an audience without WordPress Reader, WordPress subscribers, plugins, or a platform doing some of the work for me?

I honestly don’t know.

That’s what makes it interesting.

This isn’t a business venture. I’m not trying to replace WordPress or become the next great publishing platform.

I’m simply curious.

I wanted to know if I could build one.

So I did.

And Naturally, There Is a Phase Two

Because apparently 40 hours wasn’t enough.

I’ve already started looking into whether an independent blog can have things like comments and likes.

It turns out it can.

It also turns out that doing it properly takes a bit of work.

Which means, naturally, I’m interested.

I have the time, I’m enjoying the learning process, and I’ve already gone down the rabbit hole.

At this point, I might as well see where it goes.

Take a Look

The new site is still a work in progress. There isn’t a huge amount of content there yet, and I’m still building things out.

Being Kevin

Some posts will be recycled from here.

Some will be completely original.

But if you’re curious about what I’ve been building, take a look.

I’d genuinely like to know what you think.

This blog is still home base.

The new one is the experiment.

And if nothing else, I’ve learned something pretty useful:

A person can apparently build a blog without WordPress.

You just need time, curiosity, GitHub, ChatGPT, and a willingness to occasionally wonder what the hell you just got yourself into.

Finally, here are some of my other projects

Old Guy Web Works

The Sidney Project