This is not a philosophical question so much as: “why am I here on Micro.blog when I have my own website for the past 26 years?”
Something happened this weekend that finally made me rethink my website.
I was traveling, taking photographs and generally doing what I like to do when I’m somewhere new. I kept seeing things that I wanted to share while I was actually there. A photograph, a place, something strange I noticed, maybe just a quick thought about what I was experiencing.
The problem was that I couldn’t easily post any of it.
My existing website isn’t really built for that kind of spontaneous, on-the-go sharing. By the time I got back home and had access to my computer, the moment had passed. I could still post the photograph, but it felt more like documenting something that happened than being part of the experience. This bothered me.
I’ve been trying to figure out what I want my website to become for a while now. I wanted the photography, writing, travel, books, observations and random discoveries to live together somewhere. I kept trying to make my self-hosted WordPress do all of it, which meant spending an awful lot of time customizing a website instead of actually using it.
This weekend made the problem pretty obvious. I don’t need another website to maintain. I need a place that travels with me.
This answers my original question: “Why am I here?”
I want to be able to pull out my phone, take a photograph, write a few words and put it somewhere without having to think about the mechanics of the website. Sometimes I’ll have a story to tell. Sometimes it’ll be nothing more than a photograph and a note about where I was. I want both to feel natural.
Something between:
- WordPress’s publishing and archive capabilities
- Day One’s frictionless journaling
- a photography archive
- a digital commonplace book
- a field notebook
- and my own weird-ass museum of a life
There is also something satisfying about starting over. My old site still matters because it holds years of photographs, writing and other pieces of my digital life, and I’m not throwing any of that away. But I’ve realized I don’t necessarily need a new site to be another archive. I think I need it to be where the archive is still being made.
That’s what Explore More is going to be.
