Mathieu Comandon

reset

I load up an old MySQL backup on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine to check and see when was the last time I published something on one of my blogs. I find that the most recent post is on my french blog, in 2011. It was about the absurdity of choosing a linux distro based on its preinstalled packages and other things about release cycles. I don't remember exactly what caused me to stop posting on a blog but I believe it had a lot to do with the rise of social media. Twitter and Facebook were pretty fun back then. Google+ was fun too, very popular with the Linux crowd. That lasted for a while until Google shut down the platform.

Years passed and I got more involved with my projects and various jobs. Meanwhile, social media takes over. Blogging is becoming scarce outside of those for whom it is their business. Audio podcasts, then video content on Youtube becomes a more popular method of conveying information than just writing. Again, it often becomes a full-time occupation for those we now call "Content Producers". This leaves me in a uncomfortable place of having to choose between publishing ephemeral content of small value (like on Mastodon, Twitter, ...) or dedicating a large chunk of my time to just get a point across, by using near professional methods of broadcasting. I gave video production a shot but it just wasn't a medium fitted for me.

I wanted to go back to "just writing" and have a place that seems fit to do so. Not even have a blog, just a website with some written text and possibly a few images. Noticing the outdated information on my home page, this motivated me to replace everything with this current website. It's minimalistic and to the point. It doesn't reach to a database and doesn't run Javascript code. It's just HTML pages generated with Python code. My goal was to have as little friction as possible from my text editor to a published version. This allows to focus on words and ideas, not technical concerns. This already feels very liberating and knowing now how easily the act of writing can go away, this motivates me not to have an almost decade long break between publishing text on a platform that I own.

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