I’d just finished listening to episode 981 of the Hanselminutes podcast on Blogging for Developers on my way home from work and felt inspired to write something. The episode reminded me that I’d started blogging way back in 2003, and that reading an old Scott Hanselman post years after he wrote it pushed me to revive my own blog after about 5 years of social media posting instead. But when I went to update my WordPress blog, something broke. A week later, I still haven’t figured out how to fix it.

Hanselman and his guest (Mark Downie) mentioned Micro.blog in the course of their conversation, its low hosting costs, and the “publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere” (POSSE) concept it’s built around. I had already been on the hunt for new tech to host and run my blog with because of the increasingly strange and hostile actions of WordPress co-founder Matthew Mullenweg toward WP Engine and other long-standing members of the WordPress community. I hadn’t made much progress yet with Eleventy, and when I learned that Micro.blog had a WordPress import feature I decided to give it a try.

So far, it looks like every post was pulled in successfully–even if certain images and embedded videos aren’t currently showing correctly. Those are things I can (and will) fix over time. The words and ideas were (and are) the most important thing about my blog. One thing I’ve noticed about how I use social media now is that the better tweets (or skeets) work like first drafts of ideas that I expand later with full blog posts. I never posted many threads when I was more active on Twitter.

One analogy Hanselman drew that resonated with me when it comes to these social media sites is sharecropping. His old post about owning your words quotes Tim Bray:

Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper.

This is the lesson I forgot when it came to social media. Downloading my Twitter archive regularly and thinking about ways to share pictures of my twins with my parents that don’t involve Facebook or Instagram are just a couple of steps I’m taking to own my words and my photos.

As for my WordPress blog? I think an SSL certification issue may be the last remaining obstacle to genxjamerican.com working properly again. But depending on how this experiment with Micro.blog works out, I may just redirect the domain here and bid WordPress farewell.