ldstephens Blog: Eight Years of Blogging and Counting
On my walk the other day I was listening to John Gruber's The Talk Show podcast. His guest was Jason Kottke who is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his blog.
John and Jason reminisced about the history of their blogs as well as the history of blogging in general. As I was listening I started thinking about my history of writing a blog and it goes something like this:
The name of my blog is simply ldstephens. The first two letters are my first and middle initials and then my last name. I choose this because the domain Stephens wasn't available so I picked an available variation.
When I decided to start a blog I knew that I wanted to blog about technology.
I published my very first blog post on Medium in September 2015. In August of 2016, I decided to start blogging as ldstephens and moved to WordPress so that I could have my domain (ldstephens.net), identity, and place on the web. At this point, I cross-posted most of my posts to Medium.
In 2021 I wanted to move away from WordPress and the block editor. I disliked the block editor because it took time to learn and get used to compared to the classic editor. It slowed down my editing process. I like writing content in markdown in one place and then posting it to WordPress, which is contrary to the block editor's “block” approach.
So in 2021, I decided it was time to leave the WordPress platform. After a fair amount of research on blogging platforms, I settled on write.as. I wanted to keep the ldstephens name and settled on the domain ldstephens.me. I published my first post here in December 2021 and I'm very happy here.
All that said I've been doing this going on 8 years. I love doing it and plan to be doing it for as long as I can type on a keyboard. I don't have a huge audience but the one that I do has been loyal and I thank you all for that.