Back to Blogging

23 Feb 2019

After a number of years away, I finally got around to setting up a blog again. I’ve been motivated to do this for a number of reasons:

• I grow increasingly impatient with the various 800 pound gorillas of the Internet trying to herd everyone into their walled gardens, and then laying claim to everyone’s content. To add insult to injury, it seems that they are often also quite careless with your data. This is counter to the original intent of the Internet, IMHO. A pair of accomplished writers that I know, Steve Stroh and Steve Roberts, inspired me to fight the trend and go back to self-publishing.

• As with personal computing, I miss the days when people could understand the whole technology “stack”, from keyboard to monitor, to memory, to CPU, and back. Nowadays, most things are filled with inscrutable black box components that are often proprietary. I feel like a static blog like this one (based on Jekyll and Ruby) gives me a fighting chance of understanding what’s going on.

• Github’s offer to host people’s web pages (within reason) for free lowered the costs and barriers to entry to the point that it literally took less than 15 minutes to setup and start a blog.

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