Words from the Way Home
The following words were written yesterday while on the train heading back down the country. I had planned on posting it last night, butnothing ever seems to go as planned in my life.
I’m sitting on the train, five minutes ahead of departure from Leeds, back towards home. The journey will take me to Kings Cross in London, across the London Underground network, and then back out of Paddington, and on towards Maidenhead, Bourne End, and home to Marlow in Buckinghamshire.
The entire journey takes about five hours – I’m planning on spending most of it either writing this, or binge-watching a TV show I discovered this week on Amazon Prime called “Red Oaks”. I watched the entire first season last night – all ten episodes back-to-back. That sounds awful, but the espisodes are only twenty minutes or so each, so it wasn’t that bad (what is 10 x 20 minutes anyway – 3 and a bit hours ?)
I can’t remember being away for five consecutive days in recent years – and certainly not travelling between different destinations without returning home. The longest I have ever been away was two weeks, for a visit to Scotland two years ago – the journey took long enough that it wasn’t worth coming home for the weekend inbetween. I’m repeating this journey (albiet in reverse) on Monday afternoon, and again on Thursday afternoon next week. Then the week after, repeating almost the same journey again to visit another northern city for one day the week after.
While noodling around with the blog last night, I started wondering about self-hosting it again. Given the very low number of comments on it (which is kind of expected – I’m not Petite Anglaise, Dooce, or The Bloggess), there seems hardly any point having a comment facility – which in turn makes me wonder why I bother having them. If I got rid of comments, people could still email me, or tweet, or whatever else.
I guess the biggest impact of switching away from Wordpress would be the people that follow through the Wordpress community – clicking the “follow” button, that adds my post to the Wordpress “Reader” interface. I’ve never really liked it, because it encourages a walled-garden of sorts – people end up only following Wordpress blogs through it, because there is less friction that way. Everybody else seems to go with Feedly or BlogLovin – or even just bookmarks in their browser.
Moving everything to yet another platform – while technically possible – would be a huge upheaval though, and symptomatic of me tinkering*yet again – *which is a very good reason not to change anything. Even though I have a perfect backup of 90% of the blog content from a previous migration to the Ghost platform, switching yet again seems a bit ridiculous. I switched to Wordpress because I was fed up of looking after a server, after all. Hosting at Wordpress means I don’t have to tinker – I can just write.
With the above idiocy in mind, perhaps I’ll get back to telling stories with the next post. If I even hint at moving the blog, please kick me.