Outliving Facebook

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here. The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email. — Waffle on Social Media, Brett Simmons

I liked the Inessential blog: 300–500 word missives on all sorts of stuff, most of which I don’t understand. My sort of writing. Although I don’t really need to learn about putting your phone away while you eat your dinner.

Twitter and facebook are 2 years older than my blog, but I’ve also outlasted Google Wave and seen Plus’s messy demise. Blogs are like cockroaches.

So this week I got my website shit together and reverted to Jekyll (via Hugo), finally used Sass and learned how to git push and pull to Github Pages for hosting (while taking advantage of their CDN).

Wholesale changes mean you read stuff you haven’t looked at for years – I’ve republished a few hundred posts. Lucky you.

It’s taken 6 years, but I now have an HTML copy of everything I’ve published online. Things return to their original, intended state. In fact, as I wrangled with extracting HTML from WordPress and setting up Jekyll, it occurred to me it wouldn’t be much less hassle to manually write post and archive pages (OK, I’d struggle without some form of include). Throw in a university server and it’d be 1994 all over again.