I have wanted to write for quite some time. There have been many ups and downs in life over the last couple of years or so that I feel I should document in some form. But for some reason or another, I found myself consuming writing far more than wanting to produce any myself.
So, is this a promise to do more, more regularly? I doubt it. But I will try.
I have been blogging in some form since the mid-2000s. Back then, several friends of mine had our own MSN Spaces accounts, and I think that may have been where my blogging journey began. My Spaces writings sadly got lost when the platform was shuttered. I cannot even remember the URL I used back then. I also had a moody LiveJournal page for a while, which still exists, albeit behind authentication. Oh, and my attempts at using Blogger were fun but short-lived.
Some years later, after purchasing my own domain, I began to blog using WordPress hosted on cPanel.
I didn’t write much – some of it was coursework for my MA in science journalism, and I think I failed at doing any novel science reporting, writing instead about things I enjoyed or was annoyed by.
Sadly, that experiment was short-lived thanks to WordPress vulnerabilities that saw hackers mass-targer WordPress websites hosted on the .in top-level domain.
So I gave up for a while. Until I looked at Blogdown, and began this particular hideous experiment in authoring articles inside an instance of RStudio Server running within a Docker container. Why on earth would someone do that, you ask? Because I am not always practical, getting sucked into doing fun things without giving enough thought to basic things like long-term maintenance. I soon found some things broken when I attempted to revisit the project, and after some frustrating moments, I abandoned attempts at reviving it.
Until I tried it the other day, out of curiosity. And it worked! I couldn’t believe it.
Here I am, then, attempting to give this another go. We’ll see how long this try lasts, won’t we?