On friction, and ownership

Some time ago, I was going back and forth on my choice of blogging platform. (Totally a #FirstWorldProblem.) WordPress was working fine, but felt heavy, which to be fair, it has become in some ways, at least for my own use. Not that that should detract from its versatility as a content management system, but it felt like a little too much for a personal blog.

Retrophisch.net was living here on Micro.blog, and while I was treating this as my main blog, it was essentially being mirrored over at Retrophisch.com, run by the aforementioned WordPress. Mid-May, I stopped doing that, committing myself to Micro.blog going forward.

Well, kinda. More on that in just a moment.

I have a future plan, months down the road, for retrophisch.com as a professional site. More on that when those plans come to fruition. I think in the mean time it may become just a landing page or a one-page personal site, a la what you find at About.me and other such sites/services.

I flirted briefly with moving Retrophisch.net to Blot.im. I love the simplicity of text files and images synced from a Dropbox folder. This was directly related to my earlier post about decoupling the domain from Micro.blog. And by the time you’re reading this, the domain should be reconnected, because I’m staying put.

In the end, moving from Micro.blog to Blot was simply trading one kind of friction for another, and the tradeoffs ultimately weren’t worth it to me. There were some minor things design-wise I wanted to do, and moving from the Kiko theme to Matt Langford’s Tiny Theme for Micro.blog allowed me to do those in short order. Matt is very active with the theme’s development, and has made all sorts of customizations possible, so I’m set for the road ahead.

Own your own domain, own your own space

I have long been an advocate for this concept: have your own domain name, and own your own space on the Internet. Own your own email. Stake out a homestead. Sure, you can use other services—you can see the ones I’m on at the bottom of each page on this site—but ultimately, everything is on your home base. Those in the know call this POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

So yes, micro posts and photos you may see here you may also see on my Twitter or Instagram feeds, but they were here first, and even if those services were extinguished tomorrow, my posts remain here.

This is, after all, a personal blog, my little corner of the Internet. And thanks to the work Manton has done with Micro.blog, it’s a lot like blogging was in the early days, only without the hassle of hand-coding the HTML & CSS yourself (unless you feel like tweaking things). So my posts can just be posts, without a title, should I feel like they don’t warrant one, because that’s how it was back in the hand-coding days. (The dates for each post contain a permalink for the post.)

There’s still a lot of work to do. Lots of clean-up from imports I never did, and this is ongoing as time allows, what with work and family. But the place has been given a new paint job and tidied up a bit, so we can keep cleaning up the basement.

Update, 14 August 2024: I’m now making use of Matt’s new theme, Sumo. It’s rather opinionated, and I love it.