The ongoing WordPress™©® drama got me thinking about blogging again.
I started a WordPress blog in 2010, mostly to write about ActionScript when computers were simpler and better and more complicated and kind of worse.
I ran it for a number of years, and genuinely enjoyed having strangers leave comments about things I'd written or code I'd shared.
And then the spam came.
The spam.
And the constant security vulnerabilities.
WordPress' success had made it a target, and the ongoing upkeep became a pain. Worse than that, people weren't really talking about ActionScript any more. I shut the blog down on December 19th, 2014.
I launched another blog in 2018, this time running on Ghost. It consisted entirely of black and white mobile phone pictures of the Barbican with a map that geo-located them all. It was niche and weird and fun - but then I stopped living in the Barbican and the concept didn't really work anymore.
I spent the next several years writing in other people's blogs or developer portals or knowledge-bases or intranets. They weren't as monochrome as my blogs.
Occasionally I'd think of something I'd like to blog for myself - immediately followed by the mild terror of having to first setup a new blog. I tweeted a lot instead. That didn't really work out. Bluesky helped, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I wanted somewhere of my own.
And then Matt Mullenweg publicly shit himself in every one of his own beds.
So thanks Matt. It got me thinking about blogging again.