Hello, World!
Hi there! It's been a while. Today I'm re-launching my personal blog 🎉
On reflection I believe I've had at least 6 different blogs on different domains over the years- always evolving with my current priorities. In the 2000s ease of maintainability drove me to hosted solutions, then the need for customization drove me to design and author a series of my own blog codebases. In the 2010s platforms lured me in with the promise of greater reach. For quite a while it seemed inconceivable to reach a broader audience without standing on the shoulders of networks like Facebook, Medium, Twitter, and later Substack. Ironically, jumping between platforms lead me to focus less on the content itself. I posted less and less until stopping entirely.
We're in the 20s now and the web is undergoing even more massive shifts. Platforms are increasingly monetized and mostly automatically curated- achieving any reach often requires stuffing your work full of algorithm fuel. That's quite a high price- and one I'm not really willing to pay. After careful consideration I determined I value full control over the domain, not funneling users through another monetized platform, and compatibility with existing & emerging standards like RSS, ActivityPub and email subscriptions.
After comparing a few alternatives, I decided to self-host WriteFreely. It boasts an almost identical feature set to what I was planning on writing while saving me the time to author the codebase from scratch.
Stay tuned for anecdotes about startups, software development, and maybe even some occasional code. I can't promise regular updates, but I can promise it'll all be here.