A very self indulgent post talking about my writing history
👋 Hey there, this is one of my less serious posts where you get something I hope you find interesting. Feel free to share it around so they too can sign up 😊
I’ve decided this newsletter thing, using Substack, is here to stay. I’ve imported as many of my old blog posts and articles as I could find from my old sites. At the bottom of this article is a long list of all the ones I’ve imported. Please have a browse and a click if you see anything you might fancy reading. Most of them were auto-magically imported so goodness knows if they’re formatted correctly, but hopefully they’re still interesting.
Feel free to scroll and jump over this next section to just browse the old titles.
I started writing blogs and articles in October 2019. I started on medium, a blogging platform that was riding its high from launching. I started because my boss said something like:
‘You need to get into the habit of documenting what you do and telling stories’.
I took this very much to heart because I already enjoyed writing. I’d written a few short stories and written enough articles to become a science and technology editor for my University paper. Plus, it was easy to get into the habit because when I worked at Canonical it was part of my job to write blog posts for the products I managed.
Since then, writing blogs and articles has become cathartic more than anything else. I just enjoy doing it. It is a good habit for documenting things, and I do think it has helped me in my work as a product manager, so the boss was right, but more than that, I enjoy it.
Anyway, probably six months or so after starting on meidum I wanted to have a go at creating my own blog site, one that I had more control over and could use as a tool for learning. My flat mate at the time and I spent a few weekends learning CSS, HTML and JavaScript so we could build our sites from scratch. That was fun, but maintaining and getting the details right was hard, and not what I was interested in. I did that at “https://rhys-the-davies.com/”, it was my first foray into domains and DNS. It was a really good learning experience, but not something I was keen to continue. That domain no longer exists. I went back to medium and to writing for the ubuntu blog.
Another few months passed and I got the bug again. This time it was more so I could emulate some of the blogs I’d be reading or that my colleagues had. So I looked for a hands on editor, something easier than writing all the code itself, but still something of a challenge for little ol’ me. I found Ghost. A really cool open source blog thing that was exactly what I was looking for and has since seems to have really taken of. I recommend.
I stood it up at the domain I mentioned before and did some playing with themes and file structures until I had something I liked. For a while. Then I wanted other things. So I changed it up again until I was happy. Then I wanted to make it so it wasn’t just me, but I could publish other people’s work too. So I started over and rebased the site to ‘https://musing-press.com’. (I have since abandoned this domain and it has been picked up by a Japanese wedding planner, what fun.)
That was fun for a little while, but then I realised my problem. I was spending more time fiddling with the site than I was actually writing for it. I didn’t have the time (or the energy or interest) to do both.
Eventually, I caved, I decided I’d just go for a WordPress site. It was super simple, I could stand it up in half an hour and I knew I had to the option to customise it and make it cool later. But then, I didn’t. It sat at ‘https://open-cognition.com’ (I was quite proud of that domain name, which is still alive if you’re reading this close to when I publish it) and I never touched it. I wrote there, sure, but whenever I visited the pages, I didn’t like it. It was too, wordpressy. And I didn’t have it in me to make it prettier.
It was a lot of months later that I heard about Substack, a newsletter platform thing. And after a good amount of dithering, I decided to give it a go. It had/has far less customization functionality than the other things I’d tried, and almost no promotional functions, but actually those things worked for me. I like writing for the sake of writing. These constraints mean I don’t spend all my time playing with config or thinking about how to get more exposure, instead I spend more time writing things, like this.
So that’s that. And that’s why I ended up here. Obviously it hasn’t meant I’ve been writing as much as I would like, I had a big gap for a while there but I’m actually pleased with the look and feel, even if it’s quite simple, and it gives me somewhere to publish stuff again.
And now, (finally we get to the point) I’ve decided I’m going to lock it down. I’ve done some more poking around and thinking about other platforms recently, but I’ve decided this is the one to go. So last weekend I bought the domain, ‘rhysthedavies.com’, and now I’ve imported as much of my old writings as I could find and will start closing the old places down soon too. Anyway. Here’s a bunch of stuff I imported. If you want to see it all, all the things I have now, you can go to https://rhysthedavies.com/archive for it all.
