Screw it. I tried to work out a system for integrating my Twitter posts with the posts here, but it just wasn’t working. It was hard to set up just right, a pain to mess with all my RSS feeds, and the whole thing kept breaking anyway. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of getting it right, and I just don’t have the time to deal.
Even worse, the whole attempt did nothing but encourage a growing bad habit of ignoring this site and spreading my wisecracks around elsewhere. There are a number of things that bug me about places like Twitter of Facebook becoming de facto repositories for my online activity, which is why I was trying to integrate my postings a little better. For one thing, I like having all of my stuff on my site, where it can be managed and archived on — or deleted form — my server. It’s not just that I’m a bit of a nerdy control freak about my data, but after years of cultivating this space, I don’t want to surrender my online presence to the vagaries, presentation, and terms and conditions of another environment.
The thing is, though: all the action is over there now. The age of blogging as I once knew it is pretty much over, and online social interaction happen less and less across a ragtag network of personal sites, and more and more in sprawling social networks with a pretty tight control over how things work. This is hardly a recent development. Rather, it’s been deteriorating for quite some time. The barrier for entry is much lower on social networking sites, so of course people flock to them. And it’s easier to devote your energy to sites where content arises out of smaller, easier contributions from a larger group of people, rather than spending time writing, reflecting, or preparing visuals on your own site, and then trying to draw people to it to comment and interact. The ups and downs of my posting habits certainly prove that.
But I still believing in having my own place here, just as I’ve had for over a decade now. Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Thingbox and whatnot maybe the village squares where I lounge and chat with pals, but this is still my home, and still the longest-running single thing that I’ve accomplished. I don’t want to give up just yet and fully turn myself over to the wide open spaces of those other sites.
I want you to join me here, and I want to keep finding reasons to keep this going.