HomeRelaunch!
It's a new day, and so on
Well, hello there! Time to start all this up again.
This blog has been dormant, for, what, the best part of a decade I think. I started a second blog all about gardening in the hope it would get me to write more in general, but this site stayed quiet. I started a Tumblr, and even managed to post things semi-occasionally, but that faded away much as the whole Tumblr community has faded too. I thought, though, midway through a rather unusual year, that it might be time to get this site going again.
My biggest motive this time, really, is that I don’t like the way the internet has been going over the past ten years ago. The old, open Web has been closing down, drifting instead toward megacorporation-owned walled gardens where you are trapped inside a corporate app that discourages you from leaving. When those walled gardens start to shrivel up and wither, what happens? Look at Facebook; look at Twitter; look at Tumblr and its steady decline. The days of the independent blogger are gone; most people now who do want to do some form of blogging will go to Wordpress.com, or Medium, or to a site like Dev.to if they’re technically minded. So me, being contrarian, decided to become an independent blogger once again.
A few things have changed. I’ve redone the design to hopefully look reasonable on a phone, because that’s what most people use for their casual reading nowadays. I’ve taken away comments, for a few reasons: it saves me the effort of worrying when people leave controversial ones, and it saves me the sadness when they inevitably don’t leave any at all. On the technical side, I’ve ported everything over to a static site generator, so everything loads in a flash. At some point I’ll write…
The Plain People Of The Internet: My lords! Will they eversomuch be bothered about all that technical gubbins? Or is it all so much tumty-tumty verbiage, like?
Me: I wondered if you lads were still around, you know. I’m sure some people might be interested.
The Plain People Of The Internet: Lads? Lads? Now there’s not very inclusive of you, is it.
Me: Fair point, Plain People.
As I was saying, I’m sure some people out there will be interested in long technical posts about how the site is now built and structured, and although most of my technically-minded blog posts end up on my employer’s website nowadays, it may well be that some technical topics are more suited to this place. In general I suspect there will end up being more of the longer, more considered essay-type posts on here, and fewer of the one-liner posts about how I don’t have anything to say. And, as you’ve already seen, I’m sure that if my meanderings start to become too diffuse and unfocused, they will be interrupted by the Plain People Of The Internet, who at some point in the distant past escaped from a Flann O’Brien newspaper column and now seem to live somewhere in the collective hive-mind of the global internetwork.
The Plain People Of The Internet: Now there’s a word you don’t hear very often. Fair rolls off the tongue.
A whole load of the aforementioned one-liner posts have already been culled from the archives. This isn’t exactly the British Library or some great tome of record, so I’ve removed things from back in the mists of time where I was only posting to meet some arbitrary and self-imposed target of posting on a certain schedule. I’ve also gone through and cleared out a whole heap of dead links, and spotted a host of spelling mistakes that have been sitting there out in the open for everyone to see for years. There are probably many more dead links I missed checking, and many more spelling mistakes I’m still to notice, but I’m reasonably happy with the state of things as they stand. As well as deleting a pile of stuff that was here previously, I’ve also added stuff that I’d previously posted to Tumblr, such as my thoughts on what Amsterdam is like, or the experience of watching my father die. Hopefully, some people other than me will think these things were worth saving.
I’m aware that previously I’ve posted things that say: “Well, hello there! Time to start all this up again,” and then have stuttered slowly to a stop within a few days or weeks. Let’s see how it goes this time.
The Plain People Of The Internet: By sure, we will.