Last week I was talking to my friend Josh about blogging and our conversation was self-inspiring enough that I decided to set up another blog.
Well, now my new blog is my old blog too. For the past few years, I’d been occasionally posting at b10g.xyz using a custom blog hosted on various cloud services. The version I retired last week was hosted it on Cloudflare Pages with a site statically generated using Lume from Markdown files I kept in a private GitHub repo. Over the blog’s life, I’d also used Astro and Next.js on Vercel, hosted the current version for a bit on Deno Deploy, and briefly experimented with Emdash. This final version was what worked the best for me. Moving isn’t an indictment of Lume, Cloudflare, or even using Markdown in Git as a CMS. All of those things are great, except maybe the last one, and I still recommend them wholeheartedly. Just not for me.
I originally wasn’t planning to migrate, because that felt like “fixing” something that wasn’t exactly broken, but something was broken. Even though I’d published more blog posts in the last year than I had in a while, I’d come to realize that my self-managed setup lacked restraint. Any feature or tweak I wanted to add I could, and with the help of AI agents did. What I ended up with was more than enough to validate my desire to write, but I wasn’t publishing all the things I wanted to write because managing what I’d build took more of the time. I still have a bunch of drafts in my Notes.app that never saw the light of day because actually publishing involved sitting down at the right machine and doing a few manual steps that I couldn’t easily do on mobile.
I’ve learned too late in my writing journey that wrangling your workflow will drain your capacity for writing and creating if you let it. I really enjoy building platforms. It’s my day job. But I want writing to be joy, not more work. Micro.blog as a platform is exactly what I want. It’s available anywhere, it helps me syndicate to my various social accounts, it has no ads or built-in analytics, but most importantly… it has constraints I can’t change. I’m so excited I signed up for an annual subscription.
Building was fun, but I think writing will be even more fun.