A couple years ago, I decided that I would keep my blog for “long form” posts and then use the other services that I had accounts on for other stuff (short posts on twitter, links and pictures on tumblr, etc). That was fine. Of course, I don’t write long form posts very often; which meant the blog was left fallow for long periods of time. It also meant that I had to do lots of extra work to have that content appear in a consolidated form in other places, like my home page or my lifestream.
Recently, I had to fix up my wife’s blog after it was hacked, and I realized just how much of her content was hosted on other sites. Also, with twitter’s old-API retirement killing some of my tools and the various consolidation (and shutting down) of services that are going on, it started making more sense to me to go back to primarily hosting my content on my own server. This gives me more control on the things I create. So for the moment, I’m going to try hosting all my content here and then echoing it out to those other sites. Essentially, the content will live here, but I’m going to try using those other sites just for promoting it. I did consider hosting my own videos here, but that is still hard to justify since I can’t link to it from youtube or vimeo, so I’ll keep posting content there and just including it here. If necessary, I can move that content here in the future.
This does continue the now (9 year!) tradition of this blog being a grab bag of random thoughts, images, video and audio from me. That is a primary violation of the blogging rule that you keep your blog to be narrowly focused if you want people reading you on a regular basis. I have no big dream of being a “blogger” though. When I have tried to split off single-topic blogs (like digital-motion.net), I’ve had a hard time keeping them filled with new content. That violates the even bigger rule about keeping your blog up-to-date. I have a set of things I care a lot about: software engineering, imaging, music, food, politics, and motion design. My interest in each of things (or at least writing about any of them) ebbs and flows. Rather than have six blogs, it makes more sense to just have the one. Again, all of this is subject to change, which is the way I like it.