I’ve been struggling with my online presence for the last year or so, bouncing around hoping to land on the right thing that makes me happy.

My site has been published on Micro.blog for the last few years. It’s great and I’d 100% recommend it to anyone looking to start their blogging journey. I’ve contributed to the community with a well-liked theme and developed a handful of plugins. But, Micro.blog isn’t hitting the mark for me anymore.

Posting top of mind tweet/toot-like banter as dedicated blog posts, which is what Micro.blog is built around, doesn’t feel right to me. Maybe it’s a byproduct of the enshitification of my online life by social media, but to me a blog isn’t the right place for short ephemeral thoughts. It should be a place for long-form articles.

It’s hard to explain, but it just isn’t working for me and I need a different approach.

I’ve been pondering what to do about it for the last couple of months. I want a blog where I have as much control as possible. I don’t want to have to deal with bugs introduced in new features I’ll never use. And I don’t want a platform that’s a form of shared hosting either. I simply want somewhere that when I feel the need to say something, I can write a simple post in Markdown and publish it, just like this one. No more, no less.

At the same time, I don’t want to pay for a VPS I might not use all that much. I can go months without writing a long-form post, so paying monthly for a server that needs maintenance to run WordPress is not something I want to deal with anymore. I’d spend more time tweaking the server than I would writing. Or should I say, I have spent more time tweaking servers than I have writing.

That brings us to this post, which is served from a dead-simple static Hugo site published on Cloudflare pages. I took a shot at making this move back at the beginning of October 2025, and immediately reverted to Micro.blog because the Hugo workflow seemed to contain more friction than publishing a post from MarsEdit did. Truthfully, it still does. But I’ve since figured out how to reduce that friction.

The goal for 2026 is to make things simple, and this is about as simple as it gets. I’m happy with my decision and hope to stick with it. But… If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I’m fickle and prone to changing my mind often. I make no guarantees.

If you’ve followed me on the Fediverse long enough, you know I’ve bounced around Mastodon instances pretty often too. I’ve given it serious thought and have decided to go back the primary instance I first signed up on in May 2018. This also feels right. No more running and paying for an instance to feed my ego.

So, Mastodon is where the “ephemeral” thoughts will end up and where I’ll connect with others. Other social media is dead to me. This blog is for long-form posts and code examples. I think this will be the right balance of what I want from my online life.

Thanks for sticking around and reading. If you have thoughts, send an email, or toot me on Mastodon.