the corner office

Few things on the Internet are sadder than a blog which has just slowly petered out. What is sadder, though, is a blog which slowly petered out, and then there's a post saying "hi! It's been a while, but I plan to start blogging again, hope to write more often," and then that, possibly with a desultory follow-up or few, is the last you see for years after.

I risk some sadness, therefore, by doing exactly that. It'd be far safer, surely, to just shut it all down, or (as some do), have a final post saying it's over, thanks for reading, but I'm done.

In truth, I had decided to stop blogging, and take the whole lot down. I got as far as writing up the page saying "my blog is gone, farewell!", which would have been about the only page remaining on my website. It had a lame joke about quality/quantity and it not being worth the effort to maintain and there being more important things I'd rather be doing, and saying maybe someday some of it would come back but life goes on etc etc. But ironically, a perfectionist part of me wanted to fix up the default "404 not found" page so that if anyone followed an incoming link to a now-missing page, they'd get a nice explanation and link to the "my blog is gone, farewell!" page.

So for ages, somewhere far down my TODO list, was an entry saying "read web server manual and tweak the 404 page config". But because there were more important things I'd rather be doing, and life was going on etc etc, the blog just sat there, petered out, with a post from June 2021, and AWS collecting a few quid a month (VAT included) for a mostly-forgotten blog, in perpetuity.

And then at some point recently, I mentioned to Ronwen that I was going to shut it all down. And she looked rather disappointed, and I felt a bit guilty. And I got to thinking. There was the TODO list item and firm resolution to shut it all down, but another part of me was saying, I do sort of have an itch to write again... But did I really want to start again? Didn't I have more important things to be doing? Wasn't life supposed to be going on, etc etc? What did I hope to accomplish? Would the blog just go from being sad and petered out to the even-sadder "I'm back! Hope to write more" variant?

And the answer is I don't really know. That may happen. But instead of taking it down, I'm writing this. Maybe I'll forget (again), maybe I'll shut it down sometime soon anyway. But in the meantime, here's a post, and a vague promise that there'll be more.

Now the fun part will be to see how soon anyone notices.