I’ve had a lot of blogs over the years. One I created with my college roommate from the CMS up in the early ‘00s. A WordPress.com, a Tumblr, a self-hosted WP blog about instructional design while I was in grad school, a small one as part of my Jekyll-powered portfolio site (last update 2018, as of this writing), and this Micro.blog which also “doubles” as my Mastodon account. That’s a barrel full of blogs, clearly I never tire of them… even if I haven’t always kept them all current. Now that I have caught the bug again, I’m thinking it’s time for a grand reshuffle.

My primary domain name, briandigital.com is the one I’ve had since… 2000? Sounds a bit like it, too. I’ve always had my portfolio site at that URL, as well as my professional email. When creating various personal and professional accounts on the web, I’d try to sign up with briandigital to “build my brand”. Later I acquired brianchristiansen.net and finally, after its previous owner let it go (he only redirected it to a photo site like SmugMug, if memory serves), I picked up brianchristiansen.com. These latter two point at the portfolio site. I never pointed a custom domain at any of my other personal blogs, excluding the very first, which was self-hosted on a sub-domain of my friend’s personal-brand domain.

My current thinking is that I should associate my briandigital domain to my micro.blog, as I have come to make this my personal home on the web, and publish out from here to Twitter, Mastodon, and I am considering a Medium account to push the occasional design-topic article out to… if I can figure out how to syndicate a single-topic out (could I also syndicate this to LinkedIN?). This would have the side effect of allowing my Mastodon account name to match my email account, I think. I could then could use my other two to point to my low use professional portfolio. This would probably have a beneficial SEO effect with my full name in the URL, as well as updating my LinkedIn to point at a site with my name as the URL.

From there, I need to touch up my micro.blog with a better about page, and perhaps a Now, and Uses page. I hope to get back to some linkblogging. I’d like to make a fresh layout, but I am not sure yet how to do that without a dev site to break over and over, as that is how I write CSS badly.

Next, I need a complete remake of my portfolio to move to a supported platform, and away from the otherwise lovely and simple Jekyll. I have picked out Eleventy (11ty) for this purpose because I have a couple of developer friends who can support me when I break my site over and over trying to build it, and upload to Netlify. Will it have a blog? Will I move my professional writing to a category within my micro.blog? Stay tuned.