Hello, world (Slight return)

Hello, world!

You might have noticed there has been an intermission on the blog. Or probably not.

I think it says something about the state of blogging in 2014 that my website disappeared and it took 4 days for me to notice.

OK, maybe that’s just the state of my blogging, but while I’ve been off-air for a couple of weeks the Technorati blog directory disappeared, and apparently nobody noticed that either.

Personally, one of the big changes to my blog output has been that where my day job used to be product managing and information architecting and user experience designing, most days I usually have at least two bylined pieces on Row Zed or Ampp3d. The primal urge to hammer 800 words of “Disgusted from Currybet.net” that I used to have in the 2000s is somewhat dampened when you’ve been writing all day anyway.

And there’s a wider web infrastructure change too. What once might have made a 300 word blog post can now be tossed off in a quick tweet of a link prefaced with “What a dick” or “1,000x THIS”. And despite the die-hard afficianados, RSS is no longer a key content distribution channel.

Migration policy as a sign of the times

The first couple of times my blog imploded in the 2000s, I painstakingly reconstructed every word and URL. And even all the spammy comments. In fact, at one point, I’m fairly certain I had the biggest Apache redirect config in history. On reflection, it’s amazing how much spare time you had before you have kids.

When I switched to MartinBelam.com, I froze currybet.net as it was, and started afresh, with a plan to gradually migrate over some “key posts”. I think I migrated two or three.

This time?

I wrote down off the top of my head the posts in the last year or so I could remember people talking about, and grabbed them from the Google cache.

I’ve copied down a load of other posts, and I might put some of those up in due course. And quite a few, I looked at the title in Google, and thought “history does not need these words.”

Technical details and thanks

The website blew up because I made a temporary solution to hosting it, and didn’t configure any back-up. Then had “permanently fix up blog hosting thingy” on my “to do” list for 15 months.

Folks – this is what happens when you let a non-sysadmin do the sysadmin role.

The new version is back on Bytemark, who’ve been excellently hosting for UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d. The rebuild has been done by the awesome William Turrell

The future of blogging…?

Well, I’ll carry on. The output might be less frequent. But while the site was down I saw this stupid tweet about Facebook organic reach using Snickers as an example and I was possessed by the need to hammer out 300 words of “No! No! No! You sir, are on the internet, and wrong!” and was cursing that the reboot of this site was still a few days away.

That feeling isn’t going away any time soon.

But I do feel a little bit like a lone trucker cruising up the M1, despairingly calling “Breaker! Breaker! 10-4 good buddy?” into his CB radio, desperately hoping to catch the ear of the only other two truckers still on the network…