Writing for the love of it

I stopped paying for managed WordPress last month. Not because I’d outgrown it the opposite. I was paying a monthly fee to host a site I never wrote on. The subscription was the only thing about the blog that was consistent.

So this is attempt two, built on a different principle: make the running cost small enough that abandoning it for six months costs nothing.

What was actually stopping me

I told myself the problem was tooling. It wasn’t. The problem was that every platform I looked at wanted me to decide, up front, what kind of writer I was going to be. Pick a niche. Define your audience. Set a posting schedule. Build the funnel.

I don’t have a niche. I have interests, and they rotate.

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon reframed this for me in a way that finally stuck. The idea isn’t to broadcast finished expertise. It’s to work in public to leave the process visible while it’s still messy, because the process is the interesting part and the finished thing usually isn’t.

Amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They are not afraid to be beginners.

That’s a much lower bar than “publish an authoritative essay.” It’s a bar I can clear on a Tuesday.

The name

শখে — shokhe — is Bengali for doing something out of interest rather than obligation. Out of fondness for it. There’s no clean English equivalent; “as a hobby” is close but sounds dismissive, and “for the love of it” is right but takes five words.

I originally registered the domain to sell. I’d sketched out a whole EdTech concept around it, made a landing page, listed it, waited. Nobody bit.

Which turned out to be the best possible outcome, because the word means exactly the thing I wanted this site to be, and I’d been too busy trying to monetise it to notice.

The rules

Three, and they’re mostly about lowering stakes:

1. Publish before it’s finished. A note with one useful observation beats a draft essay nobody reads.
2. No schedule. A schedule turns this back into a job, and I already have one of those.
3. No metrics. No analytics dashboard, no subscriber count. If I want to know whether something landed, someone can email me.

The third one is the one I expect to break first.

What this costs

The domain, once a year. That’s the whole budget. The site is a folder of Markdown files that gets turned into HTML and served for free, and I write posts in a browser editor that saves straight into that folder.

No monthly fee means no quarterly reckoning where I ask whether the blog is “worth it.” It just sits there, costing nothing, waiting for me to have something to say.

That seems like the right arrangement for something done শখে.