a moveable beast

Jumping Ship

While I can’t say it’s ever been especially active, for some years now I’ve kept a Blogger site. I created the site around the time Google changed the name from Blogspot to Blogger, and in the months that followed, Google made all manner of improvements that only made the platform more attractive. A year or two later, the explosion of CMS still hadn’t swayed me sufficiently to consider migrating, but I joined tumblr to make a space for my creative writing, which would have been alienating (at best) on an otherwise tech-themed blog.

Now, more than five years since establishing a repository for all manner of doggerel and yawn-inducing prose, I seem to have lost all willingness to fiddle with rich text editors, equation editors, HTML editors… most any kind of “editor” you can name. The headaches and the vendor lock-in have grown intolerable, and what-I-see and what-I-get are either singly or mutually impoverished if not universally inconsistent (read, “fucked up”). I’m too old for this shit. I’m jumping ship.

I’ve decided to statically generate HTML from Markdown using an Elixir library called Obelisk. Posts are just files stored in a git repository. Publishing the result to NeoCities, which runs atop IPFS, ensures I don’t have to trust GitHub, Google, or even myself. Everything is small, fast, and maintainable. Nothing is out of my hands, and—most importantly—the blog “source” is eminently readable; in ten years time, the web as we know it could be dead, yet what I write here will almost certainly remain readable, if only to me.