New year, new hosting

It’s 2019 and I am working on remaking some of my relationship with the internet. I’m hoping to slow down, stop compulsively logging into everyone’s favorite trash website twitter dot com. My actual favorite website these days is Space Launch Report.

I think I’ve struggled to do much more than receive the awful firehose of news that twitter so often is. (Holy shit so much awful stuff is happening so fast that you get anxious just trying to figure out how bad things are.) Around all that noise there is a lot of writing that is interesting, thought provoking and worth writing about. There is a lot to be said for thinking out loud, and something to be said about doing so in public.

In service of thinking-through-writing more in 2019, I’m switching to a new CMS which will get out of my way and let me write more. Last year I wrote:

Ultimately what we need is for the tools to get out of our way, for those tools to conceal or only gradually expose complexity. A tool is for accomplishing a task, like cutting wood or hammering a nail. If the handle of the saw or hammer is difficult or complicated to hold, it effectively gets in the way of allowing the user to preform the task they are attempting to accomplish. If I want to build a bookcase (publish a webpage) then if the handle of my saw requires too many unfamiliar things of me (use of git) then I allow the process of getting a grip on the saw to stop me from building the bookcase. I let the little roadblock stop me from doing the fulfilling thing and I’m stuck shuffling deck chairs.

Not only was Jekyll proving to be just a bit too complex a system for writing, but I was also paying for more hardware than I needed. I’ve sized my server down and will still save money even after paying for shared hosting here with Reclaim.

I’ll probably spend a fair bit of time writing here before I manage to move all my previous posts and domain name over entirely. Have to do a bit to add more serifs to fonts here as well.

Image of red maple leaves lit by the sun
Fall foliage in the Adirondack: Oct 5, 2018.
Taking a moment to appreciate Fall weather when writing from a cold winter’s night in mid-January.