I've been fortunate to have been given remy.blog and so I've started a new blog over there.
But it wasn't an easy decision, and I wanted to comment on why as these thoughts seem to play into a large part of how I approach the work I do on the web.
.blog: a new URL
I love the explosion of available domain names and more descriptive URLs available to our work. I've bought a range of new extensions for projects (and potential projects), including .training, .email, .link, .jobs and .engineering. I've had my eye on remy.blog (and rem.blog) for a while now.
However, a new URL to this blog brought hesitation. I've had remysharp.com for over 10 years now, and changing the domain, although technically not a problem, feels…weird. Of course I'd be able to handle 304s and old URLs, but it didn't quite feel right.
Then the second compounding factor: remy.blog is a comparatively expensive domain to my existing .com, which, is odd since this would probably be aimed at individuals rather than businesses. The long term renewal costs could be more than I'd want to afford in 10 or 20 years. This particular domain was being gifted to me (which I'm super grateful for, and privileged to have), but once it becomes dormant it won't be gifted anymore.
All these considerations lead me to both accept the new domain but also start something new.
The new blog that will knowingly end
I've never started a project on the web that I decided or knew ahead of time that it had a limited lifetime on the web. The idea itself is counterintuitive to my ethos on the web.
One key condition of the domain (and hosting platform) being gifted to me is that I actually use the URL and actually blog. Understandably. So this means that if there's a significant period of neglect, the domain renewal will lapse, and the URLs will break.
With my early jQuery for Designers blog, long after the content production had become dormant, the URL continued to work and content continued to load. The last blog post was June 2011, but I've strived to keep the URLs working.
The URLs to remy.blog will not continue to work after 5 years of being idle. I feel strange about this, but it is the order of things on the web…I just don't like to admit it.
Different type of content
Now that I've gotten over my poor privileged feelings about being given a blog, and moreover, accepting that the responsibility isn't a huge deal, what can you expect from the blog? Well, as I've had a bit of a flurry of posts here, my aim with this new place is to allow myself unedited, incomplete and almost diary-like entries.
I think what will happen is remy.blog will host much shorter smaller ideas and as they grow (partly through mini-posts and partly offline) the idea will fully form and become a long form post for remysharp.com. At least…that's the plan!
There's already 3 posts (plus a "welcome" post) live on the site today, so please do take a look.
With thanks
Thanks to Automattic for the domain and the hosted Wordpress instance. This blog used to be self-hosted wordpress instance, but I long since ported to my own custom build due to maintenance issues. However, I've been fairly impressed so far by the wordpress.com hosted offering and I can see why I might use it for a client.
I'm not super comfortable with all the script tags that are included by default on wordpress, and I did have one go at removing them (via a de-registration process), but it resulted in me completely hosing the blog to resulting in 500 errors everywhere and having to contact support to get it fixed!
The final version you see today is based on Twenty Fifteen 1.8 theme with all the CSS stripped out and my own CSS applied. The result is just about where I wanted it to be.