Greetings all, and Happy 2026. This is my first post of the year on the last day of the month so I achieved my goal, albeit late. Hope all is well with you and yours.
The other day, a good friend of mine sent me a text with a link to the following Substack post: Why personal websites are replacing social media. It wasn’t too much of a surprise as both he and I started blogging on our respective platorms back in 2007, and I actually (as the Substack article mentions) handcoded my own website on Geocities back in 1997 or so. The article, as I think about it, is probably the best I read on this topic. It resonates with me because I’ve never lost the desire to blog and it became even more worthwhile when blogging became “a thing” with sites like Substack, Ghost sites, Medium, and the like. Sites like those became very public front facing offering features like subscriptions, newsletters, etc. – far from the niche and very personal and early blog platfroms like Blogger, Blogspot. Tumblr, etc. While these sites have and make it easy to obtain reach far more than my blog ever will, I still have control, in everyway, over what content I post, which always remains free from algorithmic influence.
There has been a big push for inviduals wanting to gain “ownership” of many things, such as music, art, and the like just because of where social tech has taken it, in terms of what it controls, and what/when it chooses to show us based on a slew of metrics that . I much more prefer to tend to my “digital garden” in the way I prefer to do so.
Well, that article really lays everything out more succinctly than I can here, so if you’re interested, give it a read.
Untik next time, oceans of rhythm…
Fresh.
