Building a New Blog

I’ve never been good at keeping up a regular update schedule for many things, frequently leaving sites alone for months (or years!) before pushing all the updates for one in a big single batch. I’ve got an old LiveJournal I haven’t updated since 2010, though I did port it over to a site on DreamWidth a few years ago, but that was more wanting a copy of the content available on a service that wasn’t Russian-controlled after the Ukraine invasion.

Still, I wanted to set up a place online somewhere that I can post about various things that’s under my own control, rather than on some social media site that might turn out to be utterly toxic and need to be abandoned (e.g. X, formerly Twitter). I do have a limited social media presence, but I very rarely post. Even when I do, it’s usually a reply to someone else, so putting my writing out directly like this still feels a bit odd. My BlueSky and AMV YouTube channel are linked in the sidebar, I’m on Discord in a bunch of servers I mostly lurk in, and I have FaceBook and Instragram accounts that are almost exclusively so I can read things from my friends that still use them.

I originally considered a number of platforms for doing this, including several different CMSes and SSGs. Wordpress was probably the closest to winning out on the CMS side, since it’s what I’ve used for my AMV and HEA Ref Stats sites, but I liked the idea of using an SSG to reduce the load on my server. The difficulty was finding a platform that didn’t need Docker¹ that also had a free theme available I liked the look of and could still customize. I’m a geriatric Millenial/tail-end Gen-Xer², and still prefer reading my content in a linear fashion, so this proved fairly difficult.

I did finally stumble across Astrofy, which seems to have hit all of the marks I needed, so that’s what I’ve gone with here. It’s taken a little while to get things shuffled into place and write all of the various snippets of content to fill it out, but I do like having a little corner of the Old Web from before the silos of social media to call my own.

I don’t know how often I’ll have something to write here, but I’m hoping it’ll at least be a couple times a year. I’ve got a pile of half-completed projects and plans for more that I’d like to do, so as they get done, I’ll have things to talk about.