For almost 20 years, I’ve run a site called Fatmixx. It used to be a group blog written by a few of my friends and me. It’s been dormant for a few years (and a lot of content intentionally purged a few years back), but a recent conversation on LinkedIn reminded me that I used to write a LOT more often. I want to bring it back to life.
Fatmixx has been hosted at Pair.com, where I had a very traditional shell account with a Wordpress installation I managed manually. They are awesome, and if you need a VPS or shell account or other hosting, they are amazing. I could write code, setup databases, and experiment with new apps without any extra cost. It singlehandedly was responsible for a lot of my early creativity building web apps. After 2 decades, though, it has been superseded by new tools - AWS, Vercel, and my local home lab, in particular.
I have been using Hugo for new blog/writing heavy sites for a few years now and really like it. It’s simple, can be hosted easily just about anywhere, and is fairly flexible. Since it outputs static pages, moving hosts or solutions is easy. It’s also quite cheap.
The downside is, of course, losing the nice workflow on Wordpress or any other hosted blog. My workflow for UsefulClever, for example, is to write Markdown files directly, push them to Git, then have that deploy to S3 + Cloudfront. Not easy to do away from the laptop, for example. Since I tend to only write long-form posts there, this hasn’t been an issue. I’d love to get back to the kind of spontaneous writing I did before, and have that synced to the social networks. That way, I have a copy of everything, and can go with richer posts when needed. So, need a simpler workflow.
Enter micro.blog - a hosted Hugo service. You’ll see changes around here after the move - new, simpler appearance, no comments, etc. If it goes well, I will also likely move Shahnicki Palace over here.
Both will cross post to socials, so you won’t need to directly follow these sites if you don’t want to. Fatmixx will be reborn for personal randomness except tech, UsefulClever will be tech and work focused, and ShahnickiPalace will continue to host our old podcast and may get used more for family updates.
BTW - this had nothing to do with the recent Wordpress controversy, ’ve wanted to do this just for efficiency & security & cost for months. The controversy did bring it top of mind… so, maybe it actually had a tiny bit to do with it. 🙂