My plan to update twice a week has, clearly, not borne fruit.

One big—essential, even—part of being a technically-oriented person who is trying to write is consciously ignoring all that technical stuff, because it’s solely a distraction. It’s incredibly easy to get bogged down in the weeds of getting the production pipeline exactly right in each jot and tittle. It’s like a car mechanic spending so much time trying to get optimum performance out of his engine that he never actually, y’know, drives anywhere. So on the one hand, switching from Technology A to Technology B for this blog has little value if it means posts don’t get published.

On the other hand, part of the reason I haven’t been writing posts anyway is because of my dissatisfaction at dealing with Technology A. It’s nice to have an application I can just put words in and hit Publish, but the price for that is a certain lack of flexibility and frustration (and also some bugs).

So, last weekend, I experimented with a Technology B, which would be greatly more flexible—but importantly also comes with some good defaults so I don’t have to reïnvent the wheel on everything. (When I first began this project, I considered writing my own blog software. I am strictly speaking capable of this, but decided against it, as, again, it would leave me no time to actually write posts.) In particular, I looked at how much of a pain it would be to lift-and-shift existing content. It turns out that, though a bit of manual work, it is not that difficult or time-consuming: essentially, copy-and-paste. This means I can easily and with a clear conscience continue to write in Technology A until Technology B is fully set up and running.

So:

• Look for changes in the website coming Real Soon Now.
• Those of you reading via email subscription can ignore all the above, because that’s handled separately, and in a way that it doesn’t even matter what is used to generate the site.
• Not that anybody cares, but Technology A is WriteFreely and Technology B is Nikola.