Colin Walker

Six years ago, I wrote about how my blogging journey was like a series of books:

• Book 1 (parts 1 & 2) are all about social media - it's two parts because I took a hiatus

• Book 2 - ownership, control and the Indieweb, setting the scene

• Book 3 - more personal, more about me and how I'm dealing with things

I find it strange that I've never really returned to this metaphor, especially with all the changes that have happened.

Book 3, as I called it, continued for some of 2020, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated with WordPress. The writing was on the wall when I started creating a "custom layer" that let me do everything ¹ without having to use wp-admin.

As I have said on many occasions, that layer formed the basis of the current blog. The nudge I needed was discovering how easy it was to make a "non-WordPress" page that looked virtually identical, with cleaner code, and pulled posts from the database.

The custom layer probably forms the later chapters of Book 3 (rather than being a book in its own right) with the new site being an immediate sequel.

While my own CMS was driven by similar goals and ideals, the switch-over was a defining moment in my journey.

Book 4 has already gone through many chapters over the past five years. There have been twists and turns in the plot, threads that were never explored, storylines seeming to go back to a previous point in time — maybe we can call them flashbacks.

It's obvious, however, that, as all good series progress, the latest installment builds on those before. Ideas that began in earlier volumes start to pay off as the story continues.

I don't know how many more books there will be, after all, I don't know how the story ends. Do I have it in me to take a different approach or do something truly distinct? I've toyed with other concepts, but they've really just been a new coat of paint.

I'm just making it up as I go along.