What happened after I abandoned my Tumblr site?
A post for #WeblogPoMo2024.
As I hit my mid-thirties, I slowly stopped posting content to my Tumblr. I’ve suggested that happened primarily because there was a lack of joy both in the world at large and within my own little cocooned life, but experience is subjective and to be honest it was all me.
That pseudonymous Tumblr account wasn’t fitting for a professional like me in a professional industry like market research.
Professional. Professional. Professional.
I still didn’t really want an audience but I did want to be findable. Ideally I was after a single-hit profile page (a bit like what omg.lol offers) and found a now-defunct service called pop.co, offering be a .co domain, a single page website, and some email. Ideal! I wanted to migrate from Google Mail anyway so this ticked a lot of boxes.
It was a toe in the water. I soon found myself wanting more.
I got myself a proper domain and started using a nice new secure private email service with that domain. I set up a Squarespace site with a Professional template. I migrated some old blog content over. Professional!
I soon found myself wanting more.
Squarespace was fine but the blogging interface was pretty poor. Hey, I thought, if I want to blog why not use Wordpress?
My domain registrar offered a crazy cheap Wordpress instance for a while so I used that…
…but found everything to be a bit of a chore. Did I want to blog? Did I want my homepage to be a blog?
What, precisely, do I want?
I ended up abandoning my online presence for a bit. When Twitter started getting weird1 post-acquisition I began using my Mastodon.social account a little, and through that discovered omg.lol.
I can’t tell you how much of a revelation that little service has been. Their ethics and beliefs align with my own perfectly, and fundamentally it just wants to be fun. Fun fun fun!
I created a silly anonymous account. I got them to migrate me to an account with my actual name, totally removing my anonymity!
I found myself wanting to blog again. omg.lol has a nascent blogging interface but by their own admission it was created in haste and is a little tricky to use. I set up a site - this site! - on micro.blog and styled everything in a similar way.
And here I am, with a joyous and not-too-professional web presence!
…but I’ve soon found myself wanting more.
Weirder? ↩︎