For quite some time now I’ve been frustrated by the experience of writing here at the ol’ Homebound Symphony. The problems are three in number.
First, my preferred app for blogging, MarsEdit, has always been treated as a suspicious interloper by my hosting service, Reclaim Hosting, and that suspicion has only increased over the years as hosting providers everywhere have been afflicted by more fraudsters (and more kinds of fraudsters). It’s basically the same problem that afflicts banks: there are so many crooks out there that the number of attempted purchases blocked by my bank has increased tenfold over the past few years. But I haven’t changed banks because I have learned from talking with friends that all banks are in this permanent panic mode. You have to price in the blocks, and the time taken to get the blocks lifted, as part of the cost of doing business. And I’m pretty sure that if I changed hosting providers I would find that the new provider is as paranoid (or rationally fearful, if you prefer) as Reclaim is.
So what this means, in practical terms, is that if I want to keep writing here, I will have to spend some time in the WordPress editing environment. Yes, I can do the three-step of writing my posts in BBEdit using Markdown, having the Markdown text converted to HTML, and then pasting that into the WordPress editor — but there are always problems with the formatting that I must painstakingly correct before posting. And I must do that correcting in an interface that seems to have been designed by demons for my torment. So the writing of posts, which in MarsEdit is fun, becomes an ordeal. That’s my second problem.
Should I think of this as (by analogy to the banking situation) part of the cost of doing business? I am not willing to do that. I am just not willing to put up with that crap.
Which leads me to the third problem, which is a minor one in comparison to the first two, but still: while I love tags, when I am engaged in a long-term project I find that tags are not sufficient to make such projects accessible and comprehensible to readers. That’s why I have ended up writing summaries of certain projects or combining a series of posts into one long one. Such hacks are useful to readers, perhaps, but they are still hacks. That’s why, when I started writing at length about the films of Terrence Malick, I decided not to write here and tag the posts but rather to start a new blog. That’s where micro.blog comes to the rescue: my Premium account allows me to create multiple blogs — and features podcasting too, something I have dabbled in but plan to pursue more seriously starting sometime in 2027. My plan going forward is to have dedicated blogs on particular topics. (How I wish now I had started a blog just to write about the City of God and the City of Man.) Indeed, I have already created one of those blogs and primed the pump by re-posting some pieces that originally appeared here.
I’ll say more about that, soonish, over at my micro.blog page, which will continue to be the source of news for all things ayjay. Remember that you can subscribe to a weekly digest of those posts. Many of my readers do, and if that’s your starting point then you’ll never have to worry about where the links go.
I’ll keep writing, and writing about many of the same things I’ve been writing about but also some new things, there and elsewhere — but this is the last post at The Homebound Symphony. I will, however, keep the blog accessible, so anyone who wants to can still read it.
I’ll miss the old place in some ways … but I won’t miss the WordPress editor, which, if God’s blessing holds, I’ll never have to look at again.
