I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this blog and how it is used. Much of what I’ve shared over the past year has been outside this site. That was intentional because much of the content didn’t fit into what I thought I wanted this blog to be. Looking at the scarcity of posts over the years, that must have been true for much of what I wrote, but that wasn’t the whole story.
Friction
Earlier versions of this blog were not designed for short entries, and there was a fair amount of friction getting the entries posted. To complain about friction is somewhat laughable when I consider the effort required before I used WordPress as my publishing platform, yet each time I considered writing something I would gauge the time it would take. This led to lots of drafts that were never revisited, or timely writings that missed their windows of opportunity.
I considered using Twitter or Micro.blog and their ultra fast posting functionality, but neither were adequate for longer entries. Publishing sites like Medium and Ghost didn’t offer a better experience than my WordPress site and had additional costs that I wasn’t willing to pay. Facebook was never in consideration because, well, Facebook.
Ironically, my solution may not be simpler, but it is easier. Using a combination of iA Writer, ChronoSync, and Hugo, I am able to write posts anywhere and my site will be updated automatically each night1. In daily use, iA Writer is the only thing I need to touch as the other two run on a schedule without interaction. Goodbye friction!
But why go through that trouble if it wasn’t simpler to setup?
Ownership
I recalled reading an article about how content sharing had moved away from blogs to social media/publishing platforms. Before social media, blogs were the predominant means to being heard, and you had ownership of your data. That’s no longer true. If Twitter, Facebook, or Medium decide to change their UI, limit access to the content you’ve posted, charge you fees, or shut down, your data and web presence are dragged along2.
I wouldn’t say that anything I’ve written is valuable to the point of being irreplaceable—and since each post is written in plain text I always have a backup—but I like knowing that my site isn’t subject to the whims of an outside provider. There is also nothing to hack, since the files Hugo generates do not contain any executable code, and they are portable, so moving to a different host is easy.
Purpose
The site’s original purpose was to provide a place for me to share random ideas—hence the name Open Range—but posting complexities limited how often that happened. With a secure, easier to use blog in place, I’m curious to see what happens next.
It’s not something I’d recommend to those with limited technical knowledge, but in retrospect the setup wasn’t overly complicated. The most challenging parts were getting the Hugo site set up—Hugo itself was a breeze to install via homebrew—and ensuring ChronoSync could communicate via SFTP with my host. ↩︎
The likelihood of those services shutting down is slim, but you still have little say in what happens to the things you post. ↩︎