Owning your Platform
28 July 2018
If everything goes according to plan, this post will coincide with the launch of my new website and blog (welcome!). I’ve built this site in an effort to have blog that’s truly mine, that I can control, and a nice little site to go along with it.
In part, the goal is to force myself to write (and publish) far more often. I’m plagued, as most writers are, by consistently thinking my work isn’t good enough or I don’t know what to write about. But I’m throwing caution to the wind and writing about whatever I feel like.
Previously, I wrote on Medium; many of those posts have been moved here. However, as Medium increasingly developed their business model, it became clear that anyone who wrote on the platform, was at their mercy. So, in thinking about my online presence and my desire to write more, I found myself here.
This is a platform I 100% own. It’s a Jekyll blog hosted on GitHub pages. Jekyll is open source so I know exactly what’s happening and can customize it to my heart’s content. And, in the unlikely event that GitHub shuts down tomorrow, I can pick up my Jekyll project and build it on any basic server. I control every character, every font, every style; and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So, watch this space. I hope to be writing much more, on a platform that is all mine. If you have an idea for what I should write about or have thoughts on using a blogging service as opposed to hosting your own blog, I’d love to hear about it on Twitter!