It seems that the constant reminders of all the wonderful new features that my previous web publishing host had in store for me finally motivated me to set up a somewhat more do-it-yourself publishing arrangement, as behooves someone of my particular talents and skills.
I’m using Pelican now, and from what I’ve seen of it so far, it’s a promising tool. I particularly like their approach to publishing multiple content types; for content that I’m writing new, I can use markdown, but for content that I want to process automatically, it accepts HTML just fine, which means that the conversion process from my previous host has been relatively painless. (Relatively painless, that is. Remember to calibrate pain on the Extract-Transform-Load scale, which starts at 8 or so.)
One interesting consequence of this change is that you may now access this blog securely if that’s the sort of thing you are interested in.
Another change is that I’ve made the conscious decision to eliminate the comments section. While over the years I have been lucky to receive many interesting and engaging comments on my posts, I think that the best feedback I've gotten has always been from people writing in their own spaces. So I've mainly removed the temptation of the comment box to prevent the motivation to write something thougthful from being burned away in a quick riposte.
If you would like to comment on something I’ve said here, now or in the future, just send me an email and I’ll be happy to either post your comments inline, in a new post, or ideally, link to your own published response elsewhere.
Or, of course, ignore it entirely, as is my right as the lord of this particular digital fiefdom.
Sadly, this change makes some of the older posts imported to this blog read slightly oddly, as they invite you to “comment below”, but nobody’s been doing that for some time, so I think that overall this change is likely to provoke a better quality of discussion and use of time. The full indictment of how You Kids Today ruined the Internet with Your Horrible Comments, and Back In My Day Things Were Better And So Forth will have to wait for a future article. (Or you could go read any New York Times article with the word “millennials” in the title, as it will say basically the same thing.)
I hope you enjoy the new format.