For almost ten years, I had a blog on java.net. I am grateful for having been given a platform and a community for my thoughts, but sadly java.net has fallen apart. I still want to share the occasional tidbit of useful information and rant about the latest injustice, but I don't want to find a new home just to see it fall apart too ten years from now. So, I am starting an unblog on my very own website.
What's an unblog? Plenty of folks have discovered the lure of static web sites. (I was amazed to find almost 400 static site generators at this site.) You just write a blog entry, using your favorite authoring tool—HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc or whatever—and regenerate the pages. You can host them on Amazon S3, Github pages, or any other place that serves up static pages. No software to install or configure. And you have the contents on your own site, without having to extract it from some unfamiliar content platform that mangled all your <pre>
and <code>
tags and <
symbols.
What about blog comments? Most people seem to use Disqus. I may do that in the future, but for now, I'll try something simpler. I'll just link to Google+, and invite you to comment there.
Fortunately, I kept almost all of the articles from my old blog, so I have a “starter set” of posts.
So, that's my unblog. It's a “deconstructed” blog, like the deconstructed Black Forest cake that my wife makes. Hopefully, I will be motivated to blog more often when I don't have to fight an alien blogging platform. And hopefully, an audience will find my output in the vast reaches of the internet.