It seems that blogs are more or less on their way out. On the other hand people publish more material than ever, but it’s divided into a multitude of services based on content and context. Personal life updates go to Facebook, vacation photos to Instagram, goofy links to Tumblr and professional stuff to Twitter.

My blog is no exception. Its updates have slowed to a steady pace of one or two posts a year while I happily tweet on Twitter and code on GitHub. This led me to thinking that I could save my blog and create one central place for all the stuff I produce elsewhere on the net. You know, to better build my personal braaand.

Of course, if you think about it for a minute, the answer is pretty clearly no. Not only would it be a great hassle to set up, but it would duplicate content somewhere where people didn’t expect to find it. Audiences on different services have formed there for a reason. People who follow me on Twitter probably don’t care about the food shots in my Instagram feed.

The kind of websites I’ve enjoyed lately are often personal blogs that just have clear and concise writing, and none of the cruft. The kind of pages that almost look like Instapapered before instapapering them. Granted, I don’t always know whose blogs I’ve been reading, but those who are particularly good I will follow on Twitter and maybe share their post there too.

Subscribing to a blog might be a bit more rare these days, especially after Google Reader died. But I’m not sure if it’s all bad. Old-fashioned blog posts still tend to work on their own because people find them through Google or social sharing.

Anyway, following this train of thought I ended up with two criteria for my future website:

  1. I want to have a place where I can easily put text on the Internet
  2. I could have a starting point for people googling me (or more realistically just to answer “what is your website?” questions on web forms.)
  3. (I would like to own the content1.)

In the end I decided to host my blog content on Github Pages, accessible through my own domain2. Easy, and totally building my brand. It remains to be seen if that helps me write any more blog posts. The chances are low, but who knows.

  1. I’ve spent enough time on the Internet to known that you need to host your blog content yourself (sorry Medium.) I once had a blog on Posterous only to see it die a year later. ↩

  2. The tech stack of the blog (mostly Jekyll really) and all the steps needed for you to read this post might be a topic for a follow-up post. ↩