New beginnings
A new home for my blog
I have been blogging for ages, my first blog being on LiveJournal back in the days it was not only the popular option, but the only option. After LiveJournal, I moved to Tumblr, then Wordpress, Medium, then back to a more basic blogging platform with GitHub Pages. However, I've never really blogged consistently, even though I have set that as a goal for myself every year (and failed every single time).
So many things have happened in my life since I last blogged, that I would need to write a separate post just for that, and I might be doing it, but right now I am taking advantage of my newly found stability (well, “kind of” stability, since I am currently without a home of my own), to pick up blogging again, and really make it a habit this time.
In addition to returning to writing, I have decided to move away from GitHub Pages and start writing on write.as instead, for several reasons:
- Federation This was the main reason for moving for me: my blog is now federated and can be viewed / followed from any federated instance, like Mastodon, for example. I do believe federation is the future, and I am using it more and more as move away from Facebook, Instagram and other similar products.
- Ease of use GitHub Pages is easy to use already, but write.as is completely content-oriented and is allowing me to focus entirely on the writing, without distractions. Also, since I was using a forked Jekyll template for my blog, it was getting a bit painful to keep my repository in synch with the original one, and I was spending quite a bit of time removing conflicts when merging the two repositories. After a couple of years using it, I am also convinced GitHub Pages isn't the best solution for blogging purposes (it was, after all, meant to be used to create pages for products hosted on GitHub) and Jekyll itself is a bit too “hacky” for me to build locally.
- Random forking of my blog On GitHub pages, every now and then, someone would just randomly fork my blog and keep all my content there. Whenever I tried to contact these users, I never had any answer back, meaning my content would just end up duplicated in random users repositories with no attribution whatsoever. I am not a professional writer or artist (though I do draw), so this is just mostly annoying to me rather than doing any harm, yet it's rather unsettling.
- Built in e-mail subscription I do love that write.as has a built in e-mail subscription feature that is easy to use and respects the privacy of subscribers.
There currently is no way of importing posts from Jekyll to write.as, so I will have to do it manually. In the meanwhile, my old blog can be found here.
I still have to tidy up things a little bit in here (footer links, an “about me” page, some CSS decorations), but in the meanwhile this is my first piece of content, hoping that many more will come.