I just posted the farewell post on 8bit.fun, the site I started almost exactly
two years ago to document a bunch of the old stuff in my collection, and to get
some experience with capturing and editing video, which I'm still not all that
great at.
I wrote about shuttering the site a little bit on the site itself so that both
of its readers won't wonder if I'm dead (I'm not as of this writing), but I
didn't really go into the gory details of why I decided to pull the plug. That's
what this entry is for.
I mentioned that the landscape of the Internet has changed, and that's
undeniable. A walk around the office I work in or at any get together of people
that have access to computers and the Internet (which is basically everywhere
now thanks to nearly ubiquitous smartphones) and I see that not a lot of people
are browsing sites. They're mostly scrolling through
Facebook/YouTube/twitter/etc. and clicking on links that someone shared into
their timelines.
That's not going to keep me from creating personal sites with the look and feel
that I want, and experimenting around with layouts. I love creating HTML pages
and putting them on some space that I control, and that's not going to stop any
time soon. But something like Drupal (the content management system I used to
run 8bit.fun) is waaay overkill for a site like that (especially once you
consider that some kind of database backend is involved that also needs to be
secured and kept up to date). Drupal is nice and featureful and powerful and all
of that, but it's a pain to update (especially if they have a few critical bugs
patched within a few days of each other and I have to do the update process
two or three times in a week). But that's not really a problem if I had a lot of
people visiting regularly, but with less than a handful of visitors, that effort
seems like it could be better used elsewhere.
So, that's what I'm doing. I'm going to build a website the old-fashioned way,
by hand-crafting a bunch of HTML files and sticking them on a server somewhere,
but I'm also going to jump into the 'streaming things and seeing if anyone will
watch' thing to... well, see if anyone will watch.
I also decided that 8bit.fun was a little bit too limiting and kind of overtly
stated that I would only cover games from the 8-bit era, which wasn't really
intended, so I'm going to put some effort behind backlog.tv, which is more
descriptive and easier to tell people to check out (it was a bad idea to put a
number in a domain name, nobody knows if they sould spell it out or not).
I'm not going to stop updating this site, though. I am focusing down and I'm
breaking the cycle that I've done for a long time which is: buy a new domain
name, put up a new blog with a CMS that I've never tried before, update
regularly for a few months, then get bored and move on to something else, rinse,
repeat. I'm breaking that cycle... by buying another domain name and doing
something I've never tried before... (*cough*). Well, change is hard, you know?
