Starting Fresh (At The End Of) 2023

I haven’t had a regularly updated blog since the days of Livejournal. I can’t guarantee that I’ll have a regularly updated blog now. Every now and then I try again. After LJ went to the Russians, I migrated to Dreamwidth and promptly never posted again. I made a Wordpress and let’s say it’s definitely not my thing. Then I moved on to the world of static generated sites with an Octopress themed Jekyll blog hosted on GitHub … which no longer builds and isn’t worth the effort to fix. Hell no, I’m not linking to any of them in case anyone (of the zero people who will look at this) is wondering.

But I have a professional homepage set up with Hugo and hosted with Netlify that I actually keep semi up to date, so I decided to make a personal site the same way. I think this one might just stand a chance of having more than one post.

I’m at least in part motivated by the disintegration of Twitter. I was a relatively early adopter, back when you could still post by text (I never did but knew people who sometimes would). But I have not opened the site once since the icon on my phone became an X. I don’t forsee going back except maybe one more time to try to export my 15(?) years of data, if Elon hasn’t locked that away behind paid accounts.

So, I’m taking the advice of SciFi author John Scalzi, who has been running his own website and blog on Wordpress for 25 years to ensure that he always has an internet home that he controls. I bought this domain years ago for the failed Jekyll/GitHub Pages site, and I’m going to reclaim it and getting going again with this Hugo site.

If you look in the corner of the site, I’m not giving up on social media. But I’m also not going to trust any of it as a long term source of me on the internet.