Blog archive August 2020
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30.08.20 / 01 / closing my typepad blog
The whole of my smallritual blog is now in the archive here, and I will be closing the Typepad blog by the end of the year. I haven't used it for a long while, and it costs quite a lot to maintain.
The peak years of the blog were 2004-2010. It was patchy but still regular until 2013. Then the number of posts went into decline, and it collapsed in 2015. There were a couple of posts in 2016 and one in 2018, and then nothing.
Facebook must of course take much of the blame. I was on Facebook from about 2011, but I never liked it. Leaving aside the security and privacy issues, and the way they kept rearranging feeds for dubious reasons, and the unattractive uncustomisable interface... the ideal length of a Facebook post was wrong for me. Different media have different natural writing lengths. A tweet is a couple of sentences. A Facebook post is a paragraph. A blog entry is five paragraphs. Medium is a short essay. Where you belong depends on your natural thought length. Mine is a blog post.
So Facebook took the time I would have spent blogging, but I didn't do anything useful with it. I also doubted that my material would be available to re-read or link to after a year or two. I abandoned Facebook amid the hysteria of 2016, and finally closed the account in 2018.
In the meantime, I had many blog posts in my head, but never the time or motivation to post them. I was busy rebuilding the Grace website and its huge archive, and then this one, and lately smallfire.org, and designing and publishing a couple of books. Ironically, I had complained from the very first month of blogging that I was too busy/tired to blog and would rather play with visuals instead!
So now what? There is always content going up here. I can write on the home page like this and call it a blog, as I did for the first two years. I was never happy that I had to split my blog and this site, because this site is my primary home on the web. It made sense to have the blog as the home page, but I never found a way of reintegrating it when it was on Typepad.
But I still feel a pang at closing the old blog. It was an important part of my life for ten years.
