A few years ago, my blogging fell off sharply. There were multiple reasons for that. I began to spend my discretionary time elsewhere, including with my young child and playing World of Warcraft with my wife after the little one was asleep. Additionally, I began to lose interest in some of the main topics I had been writing about, in particular my involvement in the Debian project.
At that time, I began to wonder if perhaps blogging had become passé. Jokes about the ubiquity of banal blogs seemed to show up everywhere. I had adopted Twitter and Facebook fairly early, and I thought for some time that perhaps these social networking outlets were the successors to blogging.
They are not.
Blogging has always been a sort of mental sketchpad for me to tease out concepts, observations, and reflections that were too nascent at the time to make their way into a paper or a conference talk. I cannot think of any of those that would fit into a Facebook wall post, much less a 140-character tweet. I would find myself with an idea or thought in my head, but trying to cram it into these newer forms was so daunting I’d just let it pass. If I did try, it felt very constrained, like trying to give directions to your house in haiku or drinking a Wendy’s Frosty through a coffee stirrer. So, I have concluded that a blog still has a place for me, and some recent posts from other folks in my field lead me to believe that I am not alone in that viewpoint.
Any of you who used to read my stuff back when I was active will notice that I am no longer hosting this under the yepthatsme.com domain. My full name was not very prominent anywhere on the site, and now it’s in the URL. This was a change I had pondered before, but the advent of social networking made me certain I should go ahead and make the switch. Anonymity is increasingly scarce on the Internet, and since I’ve said more than enough out there to implicate me, I might as well embrace the trend.
So, welcome (back) and thanks for your time!