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Now that Twitter is losing its mind (or at least its popularity), I have decided that the best way to control what people read about me is to return to blogging on my own site.
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Author

Carl Howe

Published

December 18, 2022

Buffy, one of our two cats

I can’t say I’m surprised, but reading this new Twitter policy today convinced me that I should re-instantiate my blog here at carlhowe.com. If you haven’t seen the policy, here it is.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

What this says is that Twitter intends to become an Internet island unto itself, which is just going to make its shrinking popularity accelerate.

But in the meantime, it does raise a difficult choice:

What blogging system should I use?

The last time I was blogging regularly, I used Wordpress, which I very much enjoyed. However, I don’t really like the fact that it requires your web site to be running PHP, which I find both slow and a bit risky from a security point of view. Given I’ve been writing HTML since 1992, I feel like some system that compiles HTML might be more appropriate. And given that I just retired from Posit (formerly RStudio), I’ve decided to go with its new markdown system, Quarto.

Now posting from Quarto isn’t without it’s downsides. Specifically Quarto blog postings:

  • Don’t have mobile authoring tools. No iPhone or iPad apps exist that let you compose posts while you are out and about. Yes, one can write Quarto code in Apple Notes or its equivalent, but it needs to be placed in a specific directory and structure for it to be integrated into the web site.

  • Aren’t easy to compose. Unlike Twitter clients that let one quickly take a photo, add some text, and hit post, writing a Quarto posting requires creating a new directory, writing a Quarto.qmd file, exporting a photo from my photo collection, adding a link to that photo in the appropriate directory, and saving the result.

  • Must be compiled to HTML and uploaded. Even with this overhead, we still aren’t done. The posting has to be compiled into HTML, and then the site itself has to be transferred over to my web hosting service before the post goes live.

But despite these drawbacks, I think it’s still worth taking the time to write and own my own content. What worries me most is whether I’ll have the motivation to regularly overcome the above friction and actually write what I think instead of finding it too much trouble. I guess we’ll find out.

See you next time,

Carl