I finally migrated my old blog and I'm reflecting on formal and personal writing styles
I've finally moved all 150 posts and nearly 500 images from my old WordPress blog to Pika. You can find it here. I know there are automated tools to do this. A fiend of mine even offered to push everything through his custom Hugo pipeline and extract my old posts to a human-readable format. Even the Pika team offered to help me out, most kindly. But I decided to do it myself, manually.
It was kind of a slog actually, because it happened around the same time I was preparing to have a Colonoscopy done, so my diet was both largely bland and not very energising. But, you know what? I'm glad I did it all myself. Not only did it give me a chance to go back and fix a few old typos in old posts, but it also gave me the chance to reflect on the purpose of my writing.
I'll admit, since starting here at Bear Blog, I've struggled a bit with writing more personal posts. I'm so used to a more formal style on my Rusty Ruin Journal photography blog, that I'm having to grow some new synaptic connections to write in a more casual style. It's not that I can't. I think that the bloat and culture at WordPress encourages a different kind of communication - one more focussed on adding links, thinking about post length, and having something meaningful to say.
On this last point - I think the awfully bloated backend fussiness of the WordPress platform ensured that if I was going to use it, I needed to really commit something important and interesting. At Bear Blog and Pika, there's so little bloat and the sites are so fast that tapping out a few thoughts is simple and requires little time commitment. That's a big thing when the days are so busy. There's also a community focus on personal blogging, which is fantastic. I think I've spent so long in the zone of communicating meaning and stuff that really matters (whatever that means) that I'm having to learn how to open the gates again.
Reply by email: moodywarlock@proton.me. Subscribe to my blog via RSS feed. All words and photos by me - a human. Not by ai.
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