I’ve been blogging since the last century, but I really got going in 2003. (You can read the first few posts here.) I’ve moved from Moveable Type to WordPress, shifted my hosting to various sites (including grommit, our Solaris x86 box), and most recently to a virtual machine in the AWS cloud. I’ve spun up various parallel blogs – things like clueweaver.com and speakingofclouds.com – but over the last few years my blogging has fallen away to almost nothing, leaving an insecure, poorly administered WordPress site that was probably a magnet for botnets.
So things are changing. I’ve killed several sites, including Speaking of Clouds, and I’m moving all of the blogs which I run (for myself and others) to the managed WordPress service of A2. I’ve used them for various work projects, the Cumnor Hill Books site is here, and the price is right.
Does this mean that I’m going to resume blogging? Perhaps. The decline in self-hosted blogging has been widespread, as people have moved to FaceBook or Medium to share short and long form updates, but I have a hunch that widespread skepticism about big social media platforms may translate into increased autonomy for writers. In addition, much of my blogging was always related to my work, along with the technology and travel that were inextricably involved with it. Over the last few years, my professional responsibilities have been less… bloggable. I anticipate some changes over the next few months, and it would be good to get back into the habit of writing.
So welcome back….