A year ago, I decided to retire my long-standing WordPress setup for my personal blog and set up a GitHub pages website via Jekyll so that I could accomplish the highly esoteric and somewhat impractical goal of blogging entirely through vim. (Quarantine goals — when we thought the lockdown period would only be about 2-3 weeks — were naively lofty.)

And as it turned out — as so many of my attempts to write on a consistent basis about something other than weather often do — it died on the vine after only five posts. I had the best of intentions, but some habits are hard to break.

I’ve had good luck with syndication for @chswx here on micro.blog. There are certainly kinks to work out, especially as it relates to how WordPress handles images and how that translates over to the service, but it has been pretty solid. But, still, some habits are hard to break. I’m trying, though.

At the same time, I’ve wanted a place for a while now to briefly comment on links or other things that I’ve found useful. However, when considering the cost-benefit analysis of spinning up and maintaining another WordPress install to handle that, it was like…nah. (And yes, I know about WordPress.com’s hosted offering. It’s good! But too much for what I’m trying to do here.)

So, here we are at micro.blog. I’ve transitioned the domain name over, so jaredwsmith.com now resolves here (in case you haven’t checked your address bar ;)). I’m happy about this move for many reasons:

  • The micro.blog client is good for posting quickly from the hip. I like that.
  • $5/mo to handle mostly infrequent long-form writing peppered with a lot of short-form stuff is well worth it for not having to keep up with security patches on a self-hosted service. (And, it keeps the lights on here — micro.blog is a really important project for the indie Web!)
  • I get to use my all-time favorite blogging tool again in MarsEdit.
  • I get to write long-form within iA Writer and save the drafts up.

In other words, I get to use really good software to do my writing, it is easily exportable and stays with me forever, and I don’t have to deal with patches (yet can customize the living you-know-what out of this!) And, if I wanted to, I could still use vim.

With the environmental stuff out of the way, it’s once again back on the breaking-old-habits train. See you there?