A new blog

When I started micro blogging in 2021, I never planned to do anything but that: micro blog. I’d tried to blog before—my first website was a static site generated by Jekyll—but it had never stuck. I liked the idea of instead having a fairly low-effort, ephemeral site: a blog populated with posts about what I’m reading, quotations I’m mulling over, even some pictures, etc. For a while that’s all I did with micro.blog.

But then, a little less than a year ago, I began writing some longer posts. These posts grew out of some reading slightly related to my research, & some teaching, & a talk I knew I wouldn’t publish anywhere. I found I liked writing these longer posts. It was helpful to work through some ideas in writing, & it was nice to share some pieces I’d written that wouldn’t otherwise be shared. But I didn’t quite like having those posts on micro.blog. These longer posts were not full-on essays but they were certainly more substantial than the more frequent, much shorter posts that made up most of my micro.blog. I didn’t want my longer posts to fall away into obsurity.

So, I decided to set up a blog (this blog) for those longer posts. It took me a little while to get it together—in part because of the busyness of the fall semester & in part because I took my a while to settle on a Hugo theme I liked—but I’m excited to start using this new blog. I’ve transferred all my longer posts from micro.blog over to here, & I hope to post to this blog at least once a week or so (but we’ll see how things go). As for my micro.blog, I’ll keep posting there as I have been for the last couple years: books I’m reading, quotations, links, pictures, & the like. This blog will be for more extended thoughts—at least a paragraph’s worth.

I’d had my micro.blog located at blog dot andrew belfield dot com because I never intended to have anything more than a micro.blog, & so the blog subdomain seemed appropriate to use there. Now that I have a proper blog, however, I’ve decided to reassign that subdomain to this blog, & I’ve given my micro.blog a new subdomain: micro. I know that’s confusing—what was located at blog dot andrew belfield dot com is now located at micro dot andrew belfield dot com, & blog dot andrew belfield dot com is now an entirely new site—but these subdomains seem to make the most sense for what these sites have become.

I’d like to eventually figure out ways of making the site more navigable—making the tags easier to access, maybe, or incorporating a search function—but I’m very pleased with it for now. & in any case, much as I enjoy tinkering with the site, I’m ready to start writing.