Welcome! Here we are again restarting with blogging again. I won’t lie...part of the intermittency is my attention span. Part of it is infrastructure. To be quite honest, migrating just became exhausting. But I think I found the right beat. But first, a bit of history.
I heard about blogging before it was called so in the late 90s. A sysadmin at the university I was at was very excited about a self-publishing platform. Years later, early 00s, I set up a blog: probably Movable Type but I forget exactly which one. It was a complex install and upkeep and probably had tons of security holes. It was fun! I could post funny stories about my day to day life with the occasional photos and my friends (like the people in grad school with me) could comment. No strangers. No creeps. No (anonymous) jerks. This site was running on a developer box I had in graduate school and it got wiped; I lost my stories and photos and content. I moved to a Wordpress self hosted (a much easier install!) but lost that when I left that university. I tried to stash a backup this time but never figured out how to restore it to a new host. Since then Tumblr, Twitter (micro-blogging), and other consumer hosted things came my way. Then I started using Medium which was cool but never felt like it was mine. Substack seems to be the latest cool place but I want to own my content.
It should be obvious: I’m not the first one to take control of my data and my content. My approach is called POSSE by indieweb.org. This acronym is: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The idea was presented 6 years ago in context with PESOS (publish elsewhere syndicate on own site). So here will stand the canonical reference for my personal blog which I may fan out to those other sites.
In summary, you can find my posts:
- Here obviously: my blog at my domain.
- Substack where I may use some of their community features.
- Medium if you’re there already, I got you.
While now I can retain my content, many platforms (like those listed here) don’t make POSSE easy. Medium closed its API and Substack doesn’t even offer one, so there’s some manual processing I’ll have to do when entries are cross-posted. Where I’m syndicating might change as platforms move, attract other audiences, or start charging subscriptions; finally on my own site do I own the repository again. For other more media intensive sites, like Instagram and YouTube, this becomes harder...but that’s the topic for another post.
I will also archive some of my older posts here PESOS style too for preservation. Till then, sit back...have a coffee and I hope you enjoy the writings.
