Well, here goes round…3? I think it’s 3.
I’ve been meaning to bring the site back together for a while – especially after I stopped blogging for MIT Admissions. (If you weren’t paying attention, I spent August 2007-August 2008 blogging for the MIT Admissions office. I dropped it because, well, I couldn’t keep it up to date. Go figure).
But I’ve been thinking a lot recently. Here’s what I realized:
First, I hate paying for hosting, and I hate shared hosting, which means that I was totally getting the short end of the stick with the last host. Instead, I’m moving the site to a server at school, where I have total control over the whole thing. It’s much easier to work with.
Second, I’m not actually comfortable exposing my entire life to the entire world. A large part of why I wouldn’t post is because I had no mechanism to restrict who can see it. I’ve fixed that now. Anyone can sign-up for an account on ebroder.net, and the site is also an OpenID consumer, so you can use your auth.mit.edu, Livejournal, Launchpad, Sourceforge, or other OpenID identity to sign in and create an account. I encourage everyone to do that; I expect that a lot of my posts won’t be readable unless you’re logged in.
Third, there’s a trend of spreading out information and life updates on the web. Between Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc., a personal website is no longer the source of everything. (Zeldman seems to have noticed this early on, and I’m basing a lot of my implementation goals on Dave Shea’s description of changes to his site).
It may be a little optimistic of me to think that I’ve been generating content, and it just hasn’t been making it to this site, but I’m still going to try to build a website that can adapt to that. You may have noticed that all of my Twitter posts have been copied over. I may try to change that in the future to only include posts with a certain tag or something like that, but this seems like a reasonable start. I may also try to pull in other sources like Flickr (not that I’ve posted any photos in the last few years).
So anyway, welcome back to the new ebroder.net. Maybe it won’t die this time.
