Last week I finally made some time to rebuild my blog. The server it ran on died in the fall, and I haven't had the time to properly get it back up. From 2006 until the end of 2013, vocamus.net/dave ran on a WordPress instance hosted faithfully by Mike Shaver, with admin help from Mike Hoye, Vladimir Vukićević, and likely others I don't know about. I remember Shaver encouraging me to create a blog despite my hesitation (what did I have to say that was worth reading?). "Just send me your ssh key and I'll do the rest." And he did. For years and years.
I'm extremely grateful for his encouragement to get started, and my blog has been an important part of my identity ever since. In a web increasingly built of Instagram-pics, 140 character punchlines, and various other status updates, I continue to feel most at home in the 1,000 word blog post.
Part of why it took me so long to get things back online is that I not only wanted to start something new, but also to avoid breaking all my old links. I experimented with various static blogging options on Github, but decided in the end to use Ghost hosted on DigitalOcean with nginx for redirects. So far so good.
In addition to dealing with redirects from vocamus.net/dave I've also created blog.humphd.org, which I'll also use going forward. I've also decided not to bother with comments. If you want to reach me you can do so via Twitter (I'm @humphd) or via email.
Thanks to so many of you who contacted me privately to say, "Did you know your blog's down?" It's nice that so many people missed it. I know I did.