What the Heck Is Going On?
I’ll get right to the point. I’ve been looking for alternatives to Wordpress and maintaining my own server. I’ve been doing it too long and I’m getting tired of it. I need to make things simplier. But first, a little backstory.
Over ten years ago I started a website called The Flickcast. At the time it was a weekly podcast (which is still going stong I’m happy to say) and a website devoted to things nerds love like movies, television, comic books, video games and more.
In order to support this website and podcast, I got a server at Media Temple where the site and podcast (along with a few others) has been hosted since. At the time it seemed like a good move because the site was getting a ton of traffic and the hosting could scale as necessary. Also, and this was the more important part, we would own the content and it would never disappear unless I took it down. Or, I guess, until Media Temple went out of business. Fortunately, they haven’t.
I’d become a bit wary of content disappearing after working at a place called Weblogs, inc. which was then purchased by AOL and then by HuffPo. During all those mergers and consolidations hundreds of posts and articles I’d written over the years went away, never to be seen again. And yeah, I was kinda pissed about it.
So, to make sure that kind of thing never happened again, we got our own server and our own hosting for The Flickcast and never looked back. And until recently, it’s been great . . . except for my server admin fatigue and the steady rise in cost for basically the same level of service. But that’s a topic for a different time.
Today the website is basically an archive for over ten thousand articles, posts, galleries and more. We stopped making new content over there, except for the podcast. But it’s pretty expensive for an archive and podcast hosting storage.
I’m looking at alternatives for podcast hosting too. So far, Anchor seems pretty interesting. My pal, and former The Flickcast editor, John Carle hosts his X-Men podcast over there. He’s given good reports so far.
The Media Temple server also hosts a couple other websites, including my archived personal blog as well as a side hustle site for my wife. For the moment, I’m not looking to close it all down . . . probably. I’m just tired of being a systam admin on top of everything else. I don’t really want to do that anymore.
The most urgent-ish thing for me is looking for a new home for my personal blog, a place to write more and hopefully reach a larger audience. For a long time I thought about Medium and in spite of some of the negative press I decided to give it a try. I’ve imported a few articles from my archived personal blog to here and intend to do more.
I like the idea of just creating content. But I don’t want to get into another situation like with AOL, HuffPo and Weblogs where things just disappeared. That wasn’t cool.
Is Medium going to be around in ten years? I don’t know. Will I? Let’s hope so. Probably.
Anyway, my apologies for going on like this. I’ll bet you can handle it, though. You seem like smart people.
I guess we’ll see how things go here on Medium. Although, another alternative is just to do nothing. That’s an option and sometimes, in the long run, the easiest choice.
But I’m not really a “nothing” person. So, we ride!
Okay, that’s all for now. Until next time, be kind to each other.
