I probably should’ve done this awhile ago- setting up a proper blog I more directly own and host myself. Long overdue, but here it goes!
Hosting things you write online should be pretty simple, but in this sort of fallen age of the internet, everything is a bit precarious. I’ve tried a few dedicated platforms, like Medium, which I liked well enough. But it’s hard to shake the feeling they’re only in an early stage of ‘enshittification‘, waiting to tighten the monetization screws at some imminently forthcoming point. Social media platforms feel even worse. Twitter is a wreck, and while I’ve largely migrated to Bluesky, it definitely feels like only a shadow of the Twitter of old. It stings having things I’ve written tied up on there. It didn’t feel like blogging at the time, but the threads I’d done on things like showing my students’ work, or about something I was working on, I now really wish I had done elsewhere. I do really like the Twitter-meets-Tumblr vibe of Cohost, and there’s a great games community there already, but I worry about jumping on to a platform that seems like it might not make it (I realize the Catch-22 aspect of if everyone thinks it won’t survive, then it won’t, which is too bad). My main portfolio site is on Squarespace, which I’ve found to be okay, but their blogging support is pretty bare bones. Plus, they’ve also raised their prices a fair amount every single year I’ve been on there, so I expect to migrate off of there at some point.
So I knew I had to buckle down and host something myself. I lost a lot of time and energy looking into static site generators, which many of the cool people I know tend to use. But they were just a bit too technically finnicky for me, even if I like the idea in principle. So here we are. Dirt cheap hosting, running my own install of WordPress! I’m hoping this makes it a bit easier for me to post smallish stuff going forward.
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