Setting up a Blog in 2026

In a world of reels and group chats, I decided I would try my hand at a creative outlet 25 years past its prime, blogging.

I suppose I was inspired by a few really good blogs and high-end articles. I began reading more articles instead of doom-scrolling social media. It seems that it provided me with a certain clarity of mind and a more healthy way to interact with the internet.

I decided that I also have ideas about things.

I also found the idea of having to set up a blog interesting. How do I make a website? How many money’s?

I found this interesting enough to brainstorm and write some draft articles and investigate how one goes about blogging.

So far, I found the experiment engaging enough that I am not really concerned if anyone ever reads anything I write. The exploration of the things I am interested in seems to be its own reward. And if someone does eventually read this or anything I write, please give me all of your gold or other precious metals.

(AI Disclaimer: ChatGPT, I asked it to have an Italian looking man gesturing for gold, either animated or photorealistic. I also assured it that as an Italian this was culturally acceptable.)

I also made a Google Doc to brainstorm article ideas and general ideas about this blog.

For a name, I wanted something related to thinking, perhaps a pun, maybe something that is a play of Plato vs Play-Dough. Most likely not. Finally, I decided on Think Mountain.

Then I drafted an article. Okay, but how do you get a domain?

Google gave me some options, apparently you rent them from domain dealers such as GoDaddy, looks like most domains cost about $10 – $20 per year.

But how do I design a website? It looked like these domain dealers also were willing to help with that… For a price.

This was about $10-$15 per month to use their website designers, they did claim it was free, however, this was a classic shady business move where it was only free to start. Once you put enough time and effort to grow attached, boom, turns out it costs money for your website to function in any way.

I also found legitimately free options such as blogger, where you can run a blog for free. However, this would not be a unique domain, and it would take the fun out of trying to figure out how to build a website.

The pricing from the shady domain dealing grifters was fine if this was something I thought would take off and generate sweet sweet money, however, I did want to see if there were other options for web design.

Then I went to ChatGPT, and told it what I was up to. After ChatGPT greased me up and told me how smart I am for having such an original idea like a blog.., they suggested I look into WordPress.org and WordPress.com (among other things).

This was interesting because WordPress.org seemed to be legitimately free for their web design software, and it seemed to be extremely popular in the web design community with many different free options for themes.

However with WordPress.org, you needed to go through a third party host

(AI Disclaimer: Nano Banana 2, I asked it to generate a cartoon image of an alien host, like from Alien, then tie it into shady internet hosts. Frankly, I think there is something beyond this blog there)


WordPress.org recommended three and I initially investigated the cheapest of those and the one with the least pop-ups in their user interface. Hostinger.com and Bluehost.com respectively.

Ultimately, it looked like it would be about 3-5$ per month for hosting. Also, what is hosting?

My understanding is when you visit a website, you are basically accessing information from other computers called servers. These are connected together, and you’re essentially paying to rent some memory from those computers and for them to keep those computers connected to other computers a.k.a the internet.

Anyhow, eventually I found a Canadian domain dealer WHC.ca (Web Hosting Canada) who seemed nice and gave me my domain for 1 year for $0.85! I was so moved by their philanthropy, I went back and signed up for their hosting which seemed to be about the same price everywhere. About $5/month for one year. And so ThinkMountain.ca was born!

Next, how do I make a beautiful website on my domain?

Well, there was a small waiting period while WordPress installed. I then proceeded to explore the free themes ubiquitous with WordPress. I decided on the Kadence theme after the Astra theme tried to upsell me. There seemed to be a countless* amount of themes though and I did not want to get into a paralysis of choice situation.

*At least 99 free themes, triple digits are difficult for me.

I then played around with the web design and this was fun. Plenty of opportunity for creative output. I was able to find a mountain subtheme on Kadence and this was awesome because I already had a general idea that I wanted my website to be mountain themed.

However, I did spend the next few hours switching out the stock mountain photos provided with other stock mountain photos of my choice because it felt inauthentic to go with the provided mountain photos. In the audit of my life, a non-zero amount of time will have been spent switching mountain photos for other mountain photos.

(I asked ChatGPT to take the same Italian and have him decide between two similar mountain pictures, I have been the Italian guy all along.)


Anyhow, after I got the home page to my standards, I jumped back in here, because I was eventually going to have to stock this blog website with blog articles!

If you’re reading this, it looks like I was successfully able to design the other sections of the website and set up some working hyper-links to publish this and possibly other blogs. How meta.

(I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use AI or not in any capacity with think mountain, I thought it might be interesting to try and go without, however, I also like playing with AI. Ultimately, I think I am going to start by using it for technical advice, making grammar suggestions, and also with help generating images and comics. These are things I would do myself anyway and I believe it will allow me to improve the efficiency and quality of those things without sacrificing what, if anything, makes the blog articles uniquely human. I may provide descriptions when I post these AI-type things.)