Do Blogs Migrate In Winter?

Not sure about other blogs, but this one does!

Welcome to my very latest re-born blog. It's been very - veeery - quiet on my blog for several years, partially because of life being busy, partially because of social network overload and also partially because I couldn't get myself to clean up my old WordPress blog... the site was falling apart, was prone to hacking intrusions and spam attacks and the technology was old enough to legally drive a car.

It was time to move on...

Did I still want a blog? Yes, actually. I became more and more convinced that social media had been robbing me of the energy to be creative. Late last year I reduced my Twitter presence to "looming beyond the horizon" and moved on to Mastodon, where I'm much happier with the general energy of the timeline. That alone freed up large chunks of time and energy and so I finally started seriously thinking about restarting the blog. Which meant, cleaning house. WordPress HAD to go.

So over the winter break I spent some time alone up in a mountain village (no seriously, really!) alternating between a hot spring and a café where I wrote my own version of a blog platform. I re-imported all my old posts from the old (and the old-old) blog, but did leave out the comments. Sorry, folks! Your old comments are gone.

What you see here is now the new blog, all smooth JavaScript with a very lightweight ExpressJS backend. My plans are to make this blog an ActivityPub actor - so if you have a Mastodon or Pleroma account you will be able to subscribe to this blog and see new posts show up in your timeline (this will take another month or two to actually work!). And instead of comments, you can then just respond to the posts in your ActivityPub feed, which I think is much nicer than dropping comments into a local comments section.

Also, and that was really the whole point of this exercise, I very much want to write more in 2019 and beyond. And some of this writing will be happening right here!