stevenf.com

Steven Frank's website

July 8, 2011

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve rebooted this blog. Since 2002, I’ve run it on Movable Type, Tumblr, and all manner of handmade software. Nothing ever feels “just right”. I’m not even sure I know how blogging software is supposed to “feel”.

Tumblr drives me crazy lately. It used to be a wonderful thing. Now it’s slow and just throws up errors half the time I try to do anything. I experimented with going back to Laguna (my homemade engine), but right now I really need to focus my energies on bigger things. I don’t like the way Tumblr makes me feel I’ve surrendered control of my blog, but at least maintaining it isn’t my problem.

Then there’s the issue of my tendency to delete everything periodically. Sometimes I go back and read what I’ve written and I hate it. I can’t stand reading it, the tone of it, the topics, anything about it. So I back it all up, nuke the blog and start over.

I used to worry about this behavior sapping away at my reader base, but then I realized: there really isn’t a truer reflection of myself. A restless, flighty, bee-in-the-bonnet site mirrors my real-life personality with an embarrassing accuracy.

If you have the patience to still follow my blog after all these years and despite all the bumps, you probably understand, and thank you for that. I do my best to keep you all redirected the right place if you’re subscribed, and stevenf.com is always canonical.

One thing I’d like to do is restore some of my historical posts, so it actually looks like I’ve been blogging for 9 years and didn’t just put up a site this afternoon. My long-term goal is to make my writing less frequent and off-the-cuff, and more thoughtful and methodical. If I do that, hopefully the urge to purge everything will happen less often, or not at all.

So, now then. Where were we?