Hello everyone...
Way back in 2017 I did something I never thought I'd do. I joined Twitter. I couldn't tell you why I decided to do so then, if I ever had a reason any better than "it seemed like a good idea at the time". I don't think that I did.
So many things seem like good ideas at the time. In truth, though, I did enjoy my tenure there.
Then it changed hands. A while later it changed to a new name. Along the way, its new owner seemed content to drive Twitter right into the ground by doing many stupid, rude, offensive, and just plain dumb things. Although it's been a while since what used to be Twitter has been in the news for anything like that, this is a change I've been planning to make for a while. Given the [increasingly] unhinged behavior of Twitter's new owner, I haven't wanted anything to do with the site for a while now.
The question, of course, is what comes next.
That was much harder to answer.
I don't really understand Mastodon. I don't really want to understand it. When I get home from work, after having done IT related stuff all day long, the last thing I want to do is even more of it. You may say that coming to understand Mastodon doesn't really qualify as "IT stuff". If so, we have a difference of opinion. It's close enough.
Years ago, I set up a self-hosted Wordpress-based blog that was never made public. (Gee, I hope I won't get in trouble for mentioning a competing blogging system here!) This actually worked pretty well, but I took it down because Wordpress has an awful security track record and I just didn't need or want to complicate my life in that way.
I thought a hosted Wordpress site would be the way to go, and so I dutifully set one up a few months ago through its developer, Automattic. (Actually, as I often do, I thought about it from time to time for several months if not a year or more before I did anything.) I had no problem with the idea of setting up a paid account to gain added features and capacity.
This was a disaster.
When I hosted it myself as a test all those years ago, Wordpress was easy to set up and use. I had it running in, oh, about thirty minutes or so. Most of that was simply getting the files in place on my server. Things have apparently gotten worse in the years that have followed. Wordpress in its hosted form struck me as needlessly opaque, difficult to use and far less comprehensible than it should have been. Even though I was paying for an upgraded account, I couldn't use any of the various extensions, including those that might keep spammers out..
(We'll see if that's a problem here. I hope it isn't.)
Gaining access to those extensions would have required paying a ridiculous amount of money. Indeed, within minutes of that blog having gone live, it was already suffering from comment spam. (It's here I will admit that I probably should have researched other hosting companies offering Wordpress. Perhaps they would have been more competitive.)
It doesn't really matter, though. What really killed it was the abysmal performance of their blog posting system. Typing up a post on a low end Chromebook was painful. Each character took an age to appear. As someone who can type steady-state around 70 WPM and up to 100 or more WPM if I'm really cranking along, this was an intolerable state of affairs. Not having the feedback of seeing typed letters appear immediately was really messing with me.
So I canned that whole experiment, deleted that blog, got a refund of the money paid and pondered what might be next. A couple of months later, here I am. Google's Blogger service seems to work very well. No doubt there are things I will have to learn about using and maintaining it. Those will come with time.
Those of you who have watched my Youtube videos over the years will know that brevity isn't my strong suit. It never has been. Twitter basically forced my hand in that regard, since you can't type the Great American Novel in a single tweet. Posts here are likely to be longer, maybe even ridiculously so.
I welcome comments, even those with dissenting viewpoints from my own. I'm pretty easygoing and so the ground rules are simple: don't spam, don't talk politics (nor other "hot button" subjects) and BE NICE. I won't tolerate harassment of myself or others and comments are subject to moderation for any reason or no reason at all.
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