About a month or so ago, I realized that I had become stifled with my previous blog setup. I had been maintaining a Jekyll based static blog since 2015. The first iteration was hosted via Github Pages. Eventually, I migrated the site to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I moved the git repo from Github to the server on NearlyFreeSpeech.net and that server would run the Jekyll command to generate the site and copy it over to the public folder. This worked fine. Eventually, I fiddled with it a bit more and moved the repo back to Github, but left the hosting duties to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Every push would trigger a Github Workflow that would build the site and rsync it to the host. This worked fine.
The biggest issue was the publishing hurdle. If I was on my Mac, publishing wasn’t too bad. I could create a post, commit it to the repo, then push it up; a few minutes later, the post was published. If I was on my iPhone though, then I had a few hurdles. I played around with a few ideas. I had a few Shortcuts that would publish to the Github API. I used Working Copy for a bit as well. All of these methods produced friction for me. Additionally, if I wanted to post a photo to my blog, that added a whole other layer of complexity.
A few years ago, I signed up for a hosted Micro.blog account. Initially, I used it for photo blogging. I enjoyed the frictionless posting. Then, I migrated my self hosted micro blogging posts to it and started posting short notes to my Micro.blog account. Again, the posting was frictionless. I found myself sharing more thoughts and notes online. I’m not really sure if anyone really reads them, but it became a public journal of things I found interesting. When I would write for my blog, I found myself being a bit jealous of how easy it was to post to my Micro.blog account.
I considered migrating everything to my hosted Micro.blog account. While the name of the service might be Micro.blog, it can handle short and long form posts with ease. As October wound down, my anxiety was looking for an outlet. It was then that I decided to migrate everything to my hosted Micro.blog account. I am happy to announce that the migration has been completed. If you are reading this, you are reading my blog which is now hosted by Micro.blog. I hope this incarnation of my blog results in more frequent sharing. If the site withers now, it’s not due to friction, but rather my occasional apathy to sharing online.