Hosting your own Blog is stupid!

I've hosted my own blog for 15 years. For me it has been about "freedom". The new "freedom" is being free to not have to deal with the hassle.

I started in 1994 with plain HTML. A year later I added JavaScript, ColdFusion, and MSSQL server when I started working professionally. In late 1998, I got into Macromedia Flash. At that point I broke from expressing myself verbally ("blogging") and was more interested in artistic expression. (This would be a short lived diversion.) In 1999 I started coding in PHP and learned about Free Software.

By the end of 2000 I had solid experience with RedHat 6 & 7 and considered my self an "expert". (In reality I know nothing but bash and GNU utils.) Near the end of 2000, my company hired Jerry Tubbs who brought with him a Beta of Mac OS X which I installed on my company issued G3 PowerBook "Lombard". (I clearly remember how the blue Apple logo in the center of the menu bar made it feel like an iMac.) I found myself compiling Apache, PHP, and MySQL from source tarballs and being amazed that it worked "on a freaking Mac"! I hated Apple up until that point. I hated that my company forced me to use OS 9. I hated that anybody used any web browser other than Internet Explorer 5! I quickly upgraded to Mac OS 10.0 and then 10.1. At this point I would never own another MSFT windows computer.

I would continue developing PHP for 10 years. I used custom PHP to template my own blog, then for content entry. I was very active in the Open Source community. I used a lot and contributed a lot of code snippets from/to places like http://www.phpclasses.org/ and numerous mailing lists and forums. I was very resistant to using Wordpress, but I eventually submitted to temptation in late 2004. Since then I have dealt with comment spam, plugins, a few exploit avoidance upgrades, backups, blah, blah, blah. I use http://flickr.com to host my photos. I use http://github.com to host my code. I use http://gmail.com for email with my own bronosky.com domain. I just can't justify hosting my own blog. I will continue to own bronosky.com and use it for email, FTP, and as a SOCKS proxy and SSH hop. I will continue to run a VPS at http://slicehost.com to keep up my sysadmin chops. However, I will not be hosting a blog there. For now I've chosen to use http://blogger.com and I am very pleased with my ability to use things like the http://cooliris.com Flash widget. I can now remove modPHP and optimise my Apache configuration for serving Django via WSGI and Worker MPM.