Return of the Blog

Along with a change of job earlier this year, I thought I’d better have a revamp of my digital presence – if only because my old website had quite an old picture, and a code snippet that automatically updated the number of years I’d been at my job. It was 23½ years when I left, so you can forgive a certain hands-off insouciance in updating my site.

The replacement website is online but still in development. It’s been useful for getting my hand in with some technologies I want to give a smoother introduction at work, but I suffer from a lack of enthusiasm for writing the personal puff of what is basically an extended CV.

Bringing my hosting up to date a bit has enabled a couple of other things. One is that it gives me the option of setting up a blog that’s under my control but well separated from other parts of the site, and it feels like I should avail myself of it. (The other, publishing documentation for open-source, is probably worth an article here in its own right.)

I’m not new to long-form blogging; I first started blogging on LiveJournal in 2004 and stayed for 13 years. The end of the road for my use of LiveJournal came in 2017, when LJ’s relatively new Russian ownership implemented discriminatory anti-LGBT policies required by Russian law. I tried switching to Dreamwidth, a non-Russian-hosted LJ-alike that worked for some of my friends, but my active blogging ground to a halt quite quickly, fundamentally because of the friction involved in adding images to posts – it was just too much hassle, and I gave up on trying to configure my blogging editor of choice, Open Live Writer to work with it.

So this is a third home for the Temporal Nexus. I’ve decided not attempt to deal with the hassle of importing content from its previous homes – after 3 years radio silence I’ve left them in the past. They’re still there if you want to look at them – follow the links given earlier in this article.

Like its Dreamwidth predecessor, it may founder on the rocks of apathy, but I kind of hope not. I’ve been on Twitter in the interim, but miss seeing more thoughtful pieces from my friends and who knows, I may occasionally have something worth saying myself. Stay tuned (if you feel like it).

Who knows where we’re going, but my tag cloud from LJ may provide an idea.