Epistolary Excitement

CWs: brief politics/war mention

Someone on Mastodon today made a post about how even if you only sporadically post on your blog, it doesn’t mean your blog is worth any less, or any less worth reading. And that really resonated with me, especially since I’ve been very sporadic (less so lately) about writing on here. I’m slowly changing that and writing a little more often, but it was incredibly encouraging and validating to hear that. Since I haven’t enabled comments, it definitely feels like an echo chamber, and functions as one, I suppose. But disabling comments (not enabling them?) is more out of a regard for protecting the site from spammers, &c., than discouraging discourse. I’m happy to hear from y’all on things I write, but it just has to be elsewhere (email; XMPP; Mastodon; in person if you know me offline?). I am trying to keep this site as purely Markdown as possible, avoiding JavaScript and scripts in general, and hence maintaining security, but also I want this site to be as lightweight as possible so anyone can peruse it without overtaxing a limited connection, &c. &c.

So here I am, writing a little more. My first blog was on Xanga (remember that? wow) ca. 2004 or so, and I wrote copiously, detailing my days and nights and whatever else at occasionally excruciating length and detail. I am honestly not sure where I found time for all that, or how I remembered everything so clearly. I had bought a lifetime membership to Xanga, but closed it down around 2005, when I migrated to shared hosting on a site called PowWeb. I honestly almost forgot the name of that site, but I used it to host my blog for many years, and it was great. I moved everything over to WordPress and was somehow able to import most of my Xanga entries, although by that time, I kinda wanted to shed them and leave all those youthful infelicities behind. I maintained my blog for a number of years there, as I said, and then, when I was on the tenure-track job market ca. 2013-16, I moved everything to SquareSpace and focused on a “jobs site.” This site would showcase my academic publications, CV, and blog entries here and there, and would function as a multifaceted academic resume. It was… OK. I did my best with it, but I didn’t really have my heart in it, and my blog entries were fairly unfulfilling.

After I gave up on the tenure-track search, and eventually found a job teaching in high school (which also ultimately didn’t work out), I migrated everything to a site called DreamHost, where I would host a relatively-anonymous blog through WordPress. And that was nice, the hosting was stable, and I was overall pretty happy with it. I think I just didn’t enjoy how bloated and overstuffed WordPress became, a far cry from the iteration I first used in 2005. I also wanted to do more with my server than I could do on shared hosting (host webapps, private cloud storage, &c.). It was then, in around 2020, when I heard about VPS (virtual private servers) and how I could basically do whatever I wanted with them. An acquaintance on Mastodon suggested I check out Contabo and their VPSes, and also recommended Gandi for domain name registration (I now use Porkbun and it’s great, way cheaper in a lot of ways, but yeah).

Now here was exactly what I wanted. An essentially “bare-metal” server that I could throw an OS on and get to work. So I installed Debian on the VPS, and then decided to go with YunoHost, a layer atop Debian serving as an “OS” for webhosting. And I initially installed WordPress from there, set it up with pages and blog entries, porting over some of the entries, at least, from the old site. The important thing was to be able to install whatever webapps I wanted to, and have essentially complete freedom to do what I want with the server. Obviously now I’ve switched over to Hugo from WordPress, but otherwise most things have stayed the same, and I love it.

I suppose that was a longish excursus. My point is that I’ve spent a lot of time blogging on and off for the last nearly 20 years, and things have changed a lot, like the medium &c., but I still really enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts with the world, and reading others’ as well. I was thinking earlier about all the Latin letters I’ve been reading for nearly the last 15 years. In these letters, the correspondents often say how happy they are to get the other’s letters, and they often apologize if they haven’t written the other in a while. It is all very quaint and kind and sweet to see (dulce visu aut lectu, I suppose). And blog entries are the same: people often apologize for not writing in a while, muse about writing more often, &c. Engaging with blogs is like engaging in epistolary correspondence, but the “letters” are entirely digital, not usually addressed to anyone in particular (i.e., much wider audience), and ostensibly infinitely available. Both blog entries and letters have temporal and historical context as well. A lot of the Latin letters I’m reading, while they focus on personal matters, also are against the stark historical backdrop, often touching upon wars and other atrocities, and the political squabbling of the times. Context absolutely matters, and no one is (entirely) writing in a vacuum.

I don’t know entirely where I am going with all of this, but the post I mentioned at the beginning made me think, and made me want to write a little bit to y’all today. so thanks for reading and take care of yourselves. <3