A Change in Branding

This blog started out on Blogger/Blogspot in March of 2004, then made its way to Wordpress after Google decided to make some changes with how blogs were handled. After numerous dire warnings about the lack of security with Wordpress, I settled on using a static site generator called Middleman, mostly due to a friend’s recommendation. While a good option, numerous issues with gem incompatibility with the latest versions of Ruby encouraged me to abandon Middleman for Jekyll. It would have helped somewhat to use rvm or rbenv, as I have going forward, to mitigate the issues with Middleman’s dependencies, but I also wanted a static site generator that had a larger user base and more active development.

I don’t actually recall what the blog’s title was initially, and archive.org only goes back to 2014 for some reason. At some point I settled on the title In Search of an Audience. This was, at best, aspirational, as Google Analytics only showed the occasional visit by not-me, and I made no effort to get people to actually read my blog via SEO, outreach (backlinks were a thing for a time), or social media. I adopted a “build it and they will come” mentality, which amounted more to “the world is a big place and there’s a lot more to read.”

I’ve settled on retitling the blog to “But…why?”. It captures my general reaction to ideas that are presented so often these days utterly lacking context, and thus don’t make much sense to me. It also looks good on a (non-existent) CafePress t-shirt.