Sounds like you're trying things out and learning by doing; that's great!
Being all about decentralization here, we have multiple front ends for blogging as you've seen with Ecency and PeakD being the 2 big ones. The same is true for hive-engine tokens - in addition to hive-engine itself and tribaldex we also have https://beeswap.dcity.io/convert which should be checked when converting HIVE:SWAP.HIVE either way. The fee is less there, and sometimes there is even a reward rather than a fee!