It’s been almost a year since my last update here, so I figured it was time to toss something new up.

In the early 2000s, I went kind of nuts with web sites. There was a period where I was writing multiple times a day on my blog, posting every other day to a collaborative site, writing music reviews on two sites, movie reviews on another, moderating content on another… and these were (almost) all my sites. I was designing (well, “designing”) them, coding them, and providing the content. Probably ten different sites, all with decent levels of content.

A few years ago, I seriously burned out. Not just on keeping up with the maintenance, but on the web as a whole. And then when malware injection on Wordpress sites starting to become a common occurance that could hit you if you waited a day too long to update a plugin, I decided to strip everything back to the basics. I started by simply shutting down a large handful of my sites. Kaput. Never to be seen again aside from a single page saying, “Nothing to see here.”

Of the ones that remain, they’re either static sites (I no longer have the time or will to deal with the issues that come with relying on a heavily targeted CMS) or sites built on an exceedingly simple infrastructure. The less maintenance, the better.

In terms of posting or adding content or features, I don’t commit myself to any schedule. This means that I update when I feel like it. Which means that when I feel like it, I like it. Publishing to the web feels fun again. And in an online world where social media will destroy your soul and there are seemingly threats around every corner, I need this to feel fun when I do it.

Another thing? I almost never look at my analytics. I really don’t care if I get a single view or a thousand views. I actually find myself preferring lower traffic. I lean into projects with very small target audiences or niche subjects (a specific pet cemetery in the desert? Sure!).

I’ve had a web site since 1994 and was publishing online a couple of years before that. At this point in my life, I get the most pleasure out of low-key, understated, niche projects that don’t require a schedule or worrying about engagement. I find the very intermittent “holy shit, I can’t believe ____ exists!” so much more satisfying than waves of increasing traffic over time. Maybe that’s weird.

But who cares, because in all likelihood, only a couple of people will ever see this.