It’ll Be Just Like Starting Over

I used to have a fairly active web site. I edited each page and added them to manually to the main site. I made personalized templates. I posted whatever I wanted and didn’t really worry about who was looking. Most of it is still online, archived here: http://www.ga2so.com/indexold.php

Somewhere along the way, I (and most of the rest of the people who made internet stuff) shifted away from posting stuff on my own site in favor of places like Facebook, where it’s easy to get lots of exposure if you don’t mind giving up control over the rights your material and sacrificing individual style for conformity. As Facebook gets larger and creepier, I feel less comfortable with that model.

I’ve tried to re-establish a personal presence several times by creating new web sites, but I always lose interest, partially because the new sites are usually fairly focused on single subjects, and partially because there’s nothing like the sweet dopamine rush you get when 100+ people like a post. But here’s the thing: those likes don’t mean anything. You see a post, you click the like button, you move on, and you forget the post. I don’t need the stress of worrying about how many invisible no-prize votes I get.

So I’m moving away from Facebook, and posting everything here. For the next month or so I’ll post links on Facebook here, but then I’m going to let my account die and just put stuff on ga2so.com. I’m not going all the way back to the beginning though; I’m cheating and using WordPress for blog posts. And I’m staying on flickr, twitter, youtube, and tumblr, but I’m also going to make most of my posts on those platforms links back to here.

I haven’t really planned this all the way out yet. It’s going to be seat of the pants land around here for a while. But I’m looking forward to making my tiny chunk of the internet a little weirder and more personal than it’s been for a long time.