For many years I’ve hosted my blog over on SDF. It’s fine, but I decided it’s time I make the jump to my own domain and services. Jekyll development has continued apace since I first configured the template for my static website and it’s no longer possible to build it on the latest version because some syntax has changed. This isn’t a complaint about Jekyll; in reality it’s probably an easy fix but the annoyed feeling highlighted to me that I’m no longer actually having fun maintaining a pile of templates.
Time is precious, now more than ever, so I’m throwing a few dollars a month at someone to keep a WordPress installation online. I’m not going to attempt to migrate any of the posts. Over the years a few of them received significant attention (for better or worse) and I’d rather not confuse anyone by breaking or redirecting those historical links. I imagine they’ll be just fine on SDF for the foreseeable future.
It’s also nice to have a clean start. The name of the old blog, Tinkering Down Under, was accurate. It frequently featured esoterica about software or code that vanishingly few people will care about, even those in tech. These were mixed with more grandiose posts in which I undertook to review a book or Contribute To The Discourse or something like that. I know from the logs that the Atom feed built up a handful of subscribers and at this point I can only apologise for the whiplash they would have experienced every time I posted.
With that in mind I intend to focus now on topics that are more generally interesting to a tech/programmer audience, with an emphasis on things I’m working on, and save any exotics for a quick mention on Mastodon.
Speaking of which, at the same time I’ve taken the opportunity to move my Mastodon profile to a single-user instance managed by masto.host. They’ve earned a firm recommendation from me—the process was smooth, the server runs well, and the online dashboard is tidy and effective. In the meantime, my former home social.sdf.org has become the weak cousin of mastodon.sdf.org and the famously inscrutable administration continue to be ambiguous about whether it has a viable future. At this point I’d rather avoid guessing and pay directly for the service I want.
By now I suppose all the years I’ve spent fiddling around with self-hosting and static sites and what-have-you has reduced the time I could have spent on more consequential activities. Still, no point stewing on it. I am the product of all my past tinkering and I like to think that amounts to something useful.
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