On Having Too Many Blogs

Here are the places I post at least semi-regularly:

• baty.net - my main blog for most of the last (nearly) 20 years
• snippets.baty.net - Newer microblog for easily-posting short posts, links, and photos
• baty.blog - Trying out Blot.im, which is terrific
• Tilde.club/~jbaty - because nostalgia
• photos.baty.net - A recent addition for just photography-related posts
• micro.baty.net - A micro.blog hosted site because I root for indieweb projects
• stream.baty.net - On-again, off-again experiment with WithKnown
• notes.baty.net - Tech notes and other records, currently powered by Tinderbox

How did this happen?

On any given Sunday morning I’ll think, “Dammit, today is the day I put everything at baty.net back into WordPress!” Then a month or so later I’ll say, “Wordpress is the devil and my site should be statically-rendered!” and the next week I’ll discover the “New Shiny Publishing Tool” and ‘round and ‘round it goes.

Lately, instead of converting my site to use whatever new platform I discovered that morning, I’ve created new blogs using said platform. I like this approach because I don’t lose content or break links in the transition. I also like it because it appeases my desire try different things without also forcing me to go all-in with every whim.

The down side of course is that my stuff is scattered all over the place. I don’t get many visitors but spreading things so thin can’t be good for those few who might be interested in what I write. I’ve been using micro.blog as sort of an aggregator but that seems wrong somehow.

Another thing I’m thinking about is my online identity. I’ve been off twitter since November 1st and don’t know when or if I’ll return, so I’d like to detach my online persona from Twitter. If someone wants to link to me they should use baty.net. The trouble is that baty.net is only part of me (see above).

I’m now considering changing the main page of baty.net into an aggregate of all of my online stuff. More of a “Here’s a little about me and here’s some of the things I’ve been sharing lately.” This way I can keep my various publishing experiments while still maintaining a canonical “home”.

Looks like I have something to do over the long holiday weekend.