I’ve always been leery of outsourcing any part of my Web content. A few years ago, I even installed a blog platform on my Web server with the intent of using it to publish things like this. Before I had posted a dozen things, it was inundated with comment spam, and then it stopped working entirely when I upgraded the Web server, so I shut it down. Reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that the network effects for shared blog platform — particularly for dealing with spam and interacting with other social media — make it impractical to run one on my own, particularly when I am not going to be posting things every day.

I do plan to keep up my private server systems for other functions, where I have both simpler requirements and stronger opinions, but being able to outsource spam and security stuff will hopefully make it more likely that I actually will post to this blog in the future. My primary social-media outpost will probably remain Twitter, but there are occasional things that I want to talk about that either won’t reach the desired audience there or are just too long to fit in 140 characters.

I’m still experimenting with themes, so the appearance of this site is likely to change significantly before I’m happy with it.