As the new year approaches, an email has arrived inviting me to renew the hosting account for “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” - the site that has housed my personal blog on the internet for the past ten months or so. I’m wondering what benefits are really derived from hosting my own blog. The temptation to transfer the posts to a generic wordpress blog is a strong one.
The wider question involves the commitment we make to maintaining our foothold on the internet - do we build our own island, or entrust the content we create to others? The rational part of my mind tells me that maintaining more than is absolutely necessary is somewhat foolhardy. Why try to own any facet of my online existence?
Moving back to a blog hosted by Automattic (owners of WordPress) would also absolve me from maintaining the latest version of the software. Something else I can offload to others, freeing me to concentrate on content, and sharing my thoughts and experiences with the community.
Talking of community, I have also been swayed recently by a return to LiveJournal, and unlikely new friendships. Where blogs are very much an island inhabited by the individual, LiveJournal has fostered “the community”, and feels very different because of that. Sure, it’s clunky and idiosyncratic, but it’s strengths outweigh it’s failings. The same can be said about Twitter - a community that seemed to explode around me in the last weeks of this year. Twitter shouldn’t succeed, and yet it does - and it’s fun. It doesn’t try to do too much.
So.
The coming weeks could well see the end of “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” in it’s current form. It will no doubt continue as “jonbecket73.wordpress.com”, and notice will be given when (and if) it happens. My output will still be an enormous waste of webspace, but not my webspace. For the forseeable future, one thing is certain - I will continue to write. Granted, my words will continue to carry little or no useful purpose for the world at large, but they will entertain my fingers during the more dull moments of the day, and perhaps your idle mind while reading them from time to time.
Everything changes. Embrace it.