The Pivot

I got the Blot renewal notice. I was fully on board with just letting it ride like I have done for awhile. Then I had a conversation with Nash, which as these things do precipitated the pivot.

I pivoted (again, back) to GitHub Pages. Nash made good points about my recent activity (or lack thereof) on the site. He read my post about the renewal and basically said, “But why?” My inability to answer with certainty was the final nail in the Blot coffin.

It is not without its difficulties moving between services and not something I care to do often. The move took about a day to get something running that I can be proud of, that I can call my own. Re-familiarizing myself with Jekyll, the ins and outs of posts, Github itself, etc.

There is still a lot of work to be done to make it Engineered Eloquence, but there was a moment today when I was struggling with front matter conversion when it dawned on me that I may be holding onto a past that doesn't really matter anymore.

I never thought I would be a curmudgeon. I don't think I am one, yet. But I have noticed a shift in priorities that I can only amount to the realization that very little matters long term. The overabundance of digital cruft in my various storage platforms and a slow decline in the number of times I post what I write are sure signs of that in my own journey.

One such front matter mishap ended up reposting an old entry from when I first moved to GitHub Pages. You can read it here now that it is back on the site. Here is an interesting point I made back in 2012:

The fact is that writing about the iPhone 4 is irrelevant if the iPhone 4S or 5 exists with few exceptions. Ten years from now, will I look back on such quips with pride or distaste for having written what the 36 year old me will discount as drivel? This is not to say that we should not be writing about such things, simply that our readership should see the depth at which we choose to discuss such topics, the difficulty that we as writers have in hitting the publish button. If we haven't thought through the elements of the text that are fleeting to get to the more lasting ideas, then we have failed to provide the truth for which the reader is undoubtedly looking.

I am 34 now. I look back at that post and am proud of it, tempted as I am to correct grammatical errors. However, even that would be disingenuous. The journey is about the arc and if one cannot see the arc due to a constant battle between truth and perfection, then what is the point of the journey at all. After all, I wasn't even writing in markdown back then.

All this to say that I may slowly bring content back as I find time to struggle through the uncertainties of Jekyll front matter interactions, but as I do, I may make conscious decisions about what not to save, just as much as what to amplify years later.