The birth trauma of a brand new blog lilithesque Tue, 11 Aug 2026 - 15:43 by lilithesque, Tue August 18, 2026 The beauty of the modern web development platform is just how quickly a website can spring into existence. Not like the glory days of trudging barefoot uphill both ways in the snow, dragging raw HTML code behind us one way and CSS the other. Case in point: it's kinda remarkable that a couple of weeks ago, this whole site didn't exist. (Sure, right now it's still mostly two blog posts and some CSS in a trench coat, but that is not the point we're dwelling on here.) I talked about in my last post how I've hopped between a number of platforms in my time, and a bit about the struggles I've had with getting back into the blogosphere. This post is as much about the process I've gone through getting through my anxiety around how burnout has affected my ability to create, as it is the process of getting a new Drupal site from idea to fruition. I hope either or both resonate, or are at least interesting! Deep dive retrospective time So, dear future me who doesn't think we can do this shit - here's a quick overview of what I've got done in the last few weeks to get this blog up and running. Installed Drupal on my web hosting server I've rented a very well-managed server from GreenGeeks for years now for other projects (and yes, for the intention of having this go live... let's not add up the ADHD tax [1] on this one) and had stellar service. They specialise in 100% green energy powered data centres, they provide EU hosting and they give 24/7 support - an absolute lifeline when learning by the seat of your pants. Installing Drupal actually could have been easier (they provide a package installer within cPanel) but I chose to do it all through Drush and command line just because I wanted to understand how. (And command line! Oh how I've missed you...) Even when you don't foresee leaving a service, I've learned it's really best to know how to do without it if you need to. Sorted out the domain name, DNS and SSL What's even more integral than a skeleton? That's this part of the process. Just gotta do it regardless of the platform, and I could probably do it in my sleep now. Domain name through NameCheap (they're big but reliable and, well, mostly cheap), pointed at the GreenGeeks nameservers, insert cPanel process here and hey, look at that! You can see my website! This part of birthing a website that I actually have detail in a Word file, just because it's always the same but is so step-by-step that my ADHD can trip me up on it and when Burnout Brain Fog hits, even on a single firing neuron I can still follow my notes. Installed a bunch of themes... uninstalled a bunch of themes... reinstalled a few themes... picked a theme So theming in Drupal is similar to in WordPress, but with a few differences: There's no easy visual catalogue to browse through. Oh there's absolutely a themes search on the main Drupal website, but it's not on a par with the built-in WP search. Finding a theme that provides a sidebar out-of-the-box, for example, is a lot harder. Conversely, finding out how well the theme is maintained or raising issues with the developer is much easier. Installing is done via the server command line instead of the admin GUI. Oh happy day! Drupal themes don't really add any or remove any functionality: they're entirely about the look and layout of the site. The Drupal user guide literally says 'The theme determines the HTML markup and CSS styling that wraps the content.' If you want image carousels, concertina menus, or sign-up forms, those kinds of things are found in modules. Those are entirely separate extensions of a Drupal site and - this is the deal-breaker for me - are theme-agnostic. That means I can manage the look of my site how I want, without the struggle of finding a theme that also provides the functionality that I want. This is where I've come unstuck multiple times when trying to make this as a WP blog. The sheer number of WP themes usable for something this simple was just overwhelming. On top of that, I could just never marry up the level of potential functionality I want with the amount of customisability I need to really get things looking how I envision them. With Drupal, it probably took me a couple of days to narrow down to Solo, which ironically given my dogged search for the smell of raw CSS in the morning, sells itself as 'No Code Required'. Which is definitely true! But while code isn't required, Solo does make it super easy to use code if you want to. It's turned out to be the perfect approach: a theme I can use while still re-learning my coding brain, and then adjust with carefully injected CSS or the built-in custom classes as inspiration strikes. I still really want to write my own theme for this place, entirely from scratch. It'll be a big task and a great project (and the topic of many a post). But for right now Solo is doing such a nice job that that can stay sitting much later down the roadmap. Relief! Worked through the Drupal User Guide... sort of The Drupal User Guide is a beautiful piece of technical writing. It's clear, it's concise, it's consistent. It's also missing a lot of detail. What is the login URL after you've installed the core package? Where exactly is the cron.php file? What to do when you've accidentally logged out of your site while it's in maintenance mode? How do I get rid of themes I've tried and rejected? And why does the admin theme I keep deleting keep rising like a zombie every time I log back in? And what precisely does the 'links' element in a view do, and why aren't my comments threading properly? (Spoilers: the answers to these two are, in fact, very related.) Thankfully, the answers to these questions and more can be found on Drupal Stackexchange, and in the .txt files of the actual Drupal codebase. Or in four particularly stubborn cases over the last week - because a developer too proud to open a ticket will get precisely nowhere - via direct support from my hosting provider or the super-helpful theme developer for Solo (who didn't even get cranky that I clearly have -1 to all my Drupal perception checks). Learned all about structure and fields and views and taxonomy, oh my! Picture my first morning after successfully installing Drupal: hydration and snacks at the ready, laptop open, sunny day outside, this week's mini plush helper diligently watching from their perch on my table. Me, having a complete mental block followed swiftly by a complete meltdown. The relational content structure under the hood of Drupal is actually really simple. I think it's so simple that I got myself in knots trying to wrap my brain around how the User Guide explains it and suggests planning it in advance. For anyone without a past life as a professional relational database nerd, I think this part of the guide is incredibly helpful. For my brain it was a bit like trying to recite the alphabet backwards: perfectly doable but much harder than it needed to be. How Drupal works is basically this: Fields hold individual pieces of data - like the URL of this post, or its entire copy (yep, one piece of data), or the date it was published. Blocks are made up of fields, and are a way to put fields on a page. On a blog post page, a block that contains the field 'publication date' will always show the publication date of that page. Content (i.e. pages) is made up of blocks (arranged into regions by the theme). Make a new copy of the 'blog post' content type, and a new page is created with all the blocks there like a template ready to be filled in. Views are also made up of fields, but in a nifty way: they're basically a list that keeps looking for anything new to add to itself. My home page is a view of all the published blog articles so far, and will keep itself up to date whenever a new one gets published. At the very core of it, that's pretty much it. Bits of data become little neat collections of data, become bigger collections of data arranged nicely on a page. Once I figured out that my brain already understood and had just slotted this into the SQL-trained neurons permanently mapped to this stuff, I just gave up trying to squeeze that into a plan and went straight for creating the structure in Drupal. Luckily, Drupal also makes it pretty easy to just go ahead and do that. Did I spawn a few errors along the way? Absolutely, but that's how I figure out what I'm doing wrong and fix it! Built myself some building blocks and built a site I'm just gonna say it. I do not like the WordPress block editor. I'm an under-the-hood website builder. I get antsy if I can't get at the actual code and tweak that one bit of padding by just 0.5rem, or have six pictures not five in that one table row on that one page because it changes the whole flow of the content, damn it. The block editor probably works for a lot of people, but it was my downfall as a potential WP blogger when it came in. I once tried out Wix and had the same problem. I'm just too much of a control freak who knows a little too much about what's possible and goes up the wall when a theme designer has put (often for a very good visual reason) a big block-shaped, well, block in my way. You can see why I was a little worried that Drupal also uses 'blocks' to arrange content on the page, and that they pretty much work the same way. Where Drupal differs from WP is that control of the blocks - what they contain, what they look like, where they can go, what they're called, the order they appear in - is built into the Drupal admin GUI. That means I'm not beholden to what the theme designer thought I might need - I can go ahead and make any new blocks for myself out of the fields and views I've got on the site. My RSS feed link over there? That's a block, and I've worked on the source code of it to make it look exactly right. Links list? Same deal. Installed a bunch of modules, uninstalled... actually not uninstalled any modules As I mentioned above, possibly the thing I'm loving most about Drupal is the complete decoupling of themes from functionality. Before even settling on Solo as my theme, I'd probably installed a half dozen modules to add what you might think of as basic functions to the site. Drupal Core comes with some modules already installed and enabled, so this list is just what I've added so far. For comments and comment management Comment module: turns on comments for posts/pages. Simple explanation for some very heavy lifting! Comment notify module: adds the tick box that lets you get notified of comments on a post or replies to your comment. This one particularly allows for anon notifications (without the need for login) which is pretty key to keeping the site basic. Mail System + MIME Mail modules: boosts the built-in basic Drupal mail client to handle sending HTML emails. This is what's allowing me to have links in emails, which makes it much easier to come reply to comments when they appear. Rules module: this is super powerful because it's basically IFTTT for a Drupal site. Will get used for lots of stuff in future, but for now it's just doing one very important job - IF a new comment is saved THEN send me an email (using the MIME Mail system). Klaro Cookie & Consent Manager module: pops up the cookie message on the site. Drupal have helpfully chosen Klaro for their Drupal CMS offering, so it seemed obvious to go with their selection. I'm not really collecting data at all, but the comments and comment subscribing does mean I needed something in place. For better drafting/posting Scheduler module: allows me to schedule when posts are published. Without this I have to manually publish each article, which is fine for the first couple but since I want to get ahead of myself on writing, not having to remember to come in and click a button quickly becomes very important to the flow of posting. Publication Date module: a simple but vital one, this adds an automated field to every piece of content that records the first time it's set to 'published.' Why is that key? Because if I get ahead of myself and write stuff weeks before it's due to post, all the 'created' dates will be out of whack and both the main home page and any RSS feeds will be chaos! Workflow + Content moderation modules: allows for content to have different states as I work on it such as 'in draft', 'waiting for images', 'scheduled', 'published'. That in turn gives me more information just to keep clarity on what I still need to work on. (These are part of Drupal Core but off by default; I may find that Scheduler does the job without them and turn them off again. Testing on that will happen with - well, this post!) Metatag module: adds metadata tags to the < HEAD > section of content, and almost more crucially allows these to be set automatically (for example, it'll pull the URL from this post into the correct metadata tags). If you came here via a pretty preview link on any of my socials, this is what made it pretty. For some backend magic Token module: this is black magic, but it's magic that helps run a lot of other things. It does that by making it much easier to insert the right code for 'tokens' into fields, rules - basically anywhere. This is awesome because tokens basically do a kind of lookup, best explained with the example of the comment you're about to leave on this awesome post: When you leave the comment, the Rules module will trigger sending me an email In the settings, the email looks like this: Your content '{{ comment.entity_id.entity.title }}' has a new comment, read it here: {{ comment.entity_id.entity|entity_url }}! Which makes the email I actually get look like this: Your content 'The birth trauma of a brand new blog' has a new comment, read it here: https://selectstar.life/blog/the-birth-trauma-of-a-brand-new-blog! See how that's pretty nifty? Media + Media Library modules: organises any media - images, audio, video - into something more user-friendly than just a list of files in a single directory. Also adds fields to each different type of media that can be used elsewhere via token, for example being popped into metadata tags. It's still a short window for data gathering, but I think this would be my recommended set of additions to Drupal Core for a solid start to any site. It adds most of the things that would be there as standard in a WP installation (with the exception of a few things like caching that I haven't got to yet), but having to choose to add each thing is really making me feel more in control and less overwhelmed by it all. And it means I really understand how every function within the site fits together - a win-win! Gave that solid backend a cool - and useable - frontend I have no idea how I somehow avoided six days of Google Fonts rabbitholing to find The Perfect Header Font, so please don't ask me for the secret. It's quite possible that the limited time to take part in Blaugust helped keep the ADHD on track... or that I've just delayed that for the near future build when I add a header and favicon. I've gone for Open Sans as a body font, because it's open source and popular, and just sort of slides into the background of your attention. A good body font should be a bit like good special effects - make everything look better without you noticing it. I went for the Solo theme because it has a lot of optional regions available, so building the basic page layout I'd already designed on paper really did involve no code at all. One part of the Drupal User Guide I do recommend following is the initial sketching out what info you want where on the page - it helps immensely when sat down with the tools ready to actually make it happen. Putting together menus, some info about me and a sidebar was a pretty short part of this whole process too. Even these first couple of posts, even being longform, haven't been too much work. And Drupal actually autogenerates a basic RSS feed. The content I've spent the longest on so far? Stripping sixteen layers of HTML hell out of my privacy and cookie notices. There were hard-coded rgb colours in every <span> tag. There were random classes that weren't even in the <style> header. Each bullet list item was its own goddamn list. Not even these are reasons to pay for the premium consent managers when you're running a personal blog site, but holy shit, make sure to have something with a decent find/replace tool to hand. Made it look funky and colourful - and accessible One of the trickiest yet most enthralling parts of making a website is picking out a colour palette. There are hundreds of tools and tips on how to do it and how the psychology of colour works, and it's something I've done a few times in my old life so I could have dived super deep on this one. But for a site that's going to be very much me, my voice, I really just picked a couple of my favourite colours - teal and purple - and poked at the Color Harmony Generator[2] to find some balancing notes. Where I couldn't pick or wasn't set on a very specific shade, I employed my own highly technical hex code selection algorithm. It's called 'can we make a funny reference from this hex code', and you can see it in such colours as: #2B2B2B - yes, my background colour is a hidden Shakespeare reference #1C1C1C - what've we got 'ere then? #EB00B5 - they're like regular boobs, but electronic The final but most important step before settling on colours is always running all the potential foreground/background combos through the WebAIM Contrast Checker.[3] I also ran the whole site through their Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool which goes into more detail not just on colours but the proper use of styling and navigation for accessibility. It scores a 9.8/10 but there are a handful of alerts I'll still try and fix up soon. I've tried to hint at a neon-90s-command-line vibe with this colour scheme. It's early days but I think I've left myself some fun places to go with it. It's gonna be fun making some site graphics soon with these colours! In today's story we learned Let's conclude with a quick summary of the costs involved in getting to this point: $2.98 for a new .life domain £13 for a month's hosting and email accounts (including server tech support) £0 for a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate £0 in platform, theme, module or font costs approximately 10 days of site building 3 more days of regulating the anxiety an entire strip of beta blockers an as yet undetermined amount of my sanity a free membership of Termly.io for data protection words I couldn't bear to write from scratch The technical learning curve has been immense, and immensely fun. But the biggest lesson, like a 1980s cartoon ending, has been how I can handle doing this level of technical and creative work again. And I can handle it - by making a whole heap of accommodations for myself, and by treating myself fairly and with grace even when I'm mid-meltdown. The only deadlines are my own and I can do things the way I need them done. Anxiety sucks and I have to allow for it, allow it its place, and allot myself the extra time to deal with it - but I can work that into the process just like I can anything else. Even when there are snags or grinding halts I just have to have a next step, not always a solution. And I'm really looking forward to the next steps around here. ADHD tax: the money you spend because ADHD makes you either certain you need the thing because you'll start using it any day now, or makes you entirely forget where the thing is/what it's for/that it even exists so you buy sixty-three more of it.↩︎ One of those many colour choice tools I mentioned above, and solidly not AI.↩︎ There are other tools, but this one's free, easy to understand, and from the horse's mouth rather than Adobe. ↩︎ Tags the making of anxiety mental health development deep dive drupal coding website design accessibility by design long-ass post > Comments (2) The birth trauma of a brand new blog | SELECT * FROM [LIFE] Panel Smm Mura… (not verified) 5 days 1 hour ago Permalink New Hello! Someone in my Myspace group shared this website with us so I came to check it out. I'm definitely enjoying the information. I'm bookmarking and will be tweeting this to my followers! Exceptional blog and outstanding style and design. Hi hello! Aww thank you for… lilithesque 4 days 23 hours ago Permalink New Hi hello! Aww thank you for such a great comment, I'm so glad you're enjoying it and that you love the style and design too! In reply to The birth trauma of a brand new blog | SELECT * FROM [LIFE] by Panel Smm Mura… (not verified)