Tonight (ok, eventually) we’re gonna blog like it’s 2009
Hi, all!
This is a brand-new website and a brand-new blog. It happens to coincide with the start of a new year and a new decade, but it’s completely accidental. I made this entire site in the event that I decided to/needed to write more about the implosion of the Romance Writers of America, before Vox assigned me the article about the whole mess.
I really needed a space where I could easily do good old-fashioned blogging but with basic modernized functionality. I initially went back to my beloved old livejournal account for this, and the updates its Russian overlords have made over the years gave me full functionality, but the under-the-hood coding was now so complex that by the time I was done formatting any post worth posting, the whole thing was over the post size limit. Meanwhile, Dreamwidth has an enormous, practically infinite post size limit, but everything is hard-coded html, and there was a time when that would have been ideal, but now I’m just like, ‘what, you’re telling me I can’t even embed tweets?’
I could have done Tumblr, but also… I couldn’t have done Tumblr, easily, for real longreads, and I wanted a space where no one could reblog my words, where my thoughts weren’t a tacit part of a larger social media performance, and weren’t being necessarily offered up for public scrutiny at the close, kneejerk level afforded by an instant reblog.
That left, basically, old-school Blogger, which I’ve never liked, and old-school WordPress, which I actually considered — I even updated my old free WordPress account and brushed off the hilarious posts I made there, so if you find them, know they were made well over a decade ago and be kind. But the state of free-hosted WordPress is a mess, skeevy ads everywhere.
Soooo I realized the ideal thing would be a self-hosted WordPress blog. In 2019. Like it was 2008. So I made the thing. But I had to make this whole website around the thing, and in that process I’ve basically put my professional and fandom bona fides here for all to see. I am not sure how well this will work — and ironically, during the week I spent making this website, so I could host the blog, so I could blog about the RWA, so I could catch the fly, Vox asked me to write an article on the RWA, so the whole point of making the website to make the blog to catch the RWA fly was now moot.
But here we are. I’m excited to just have a stress-free, performance-free place to put words again. We’ll see what comes of it.
Happy 2020 to all of you!