Colin Walker

Dave has written a couple of provocative posts stating 'why you stopped blogging' —spoiler alert, he blames social media.

Yes, I stopped 'blogging' and moved to Google+ for just over a year (I referred to it as social blogging) but that wasn't why I stopped posting on my own site.

I had become disillusioned with the process, with the quest for perfection, with making everything an essay. I tried to rein it back by posting "thoughts" (shorter posts) but needed to step away.

Moving to Google+ allowed a certain amount of freedom and reflection even if the #write365 project took its toll on me. I felt (and still feel) that I needed to see things from the outside to work out what I was going to do, what I needed to do; to realise what blogging really meant to me.

I've been there, trying to make my site work with others:

• opengraph and Twitter cards
• outsourced comments to Google+ and Medium
• made RSS feed decisions just so they would play nicely with micro.blog

It didn't really sit well with me:

... whether what we do on our own sites should be dictated by the means of distribution.

I'm torn between thinking "it's a tough call" and "what am I playing at?"

Manton made a change to handling long posts which meant I no longer had to compromise but the stage was set, I decided to never again let an external service dictate how my own blog operated.

I will make things work with other services (the recent rssCloud implementation for example) but never to the detriment of my own site.