All content on this site, unless otherwise noted, is the work Brandon. I've been blogging off and on for a long time and this is the latest iteration of this. My main blogging workflow, as it currently stands, is detailed in this post.

Tools Used:

The blog/main page of this site is currently hosted on BearBlog. Header link icons all come from FontAwesome, and the SVG icons in the callout boxes come from Tabler. The about, now and photo journal are hosted at omg.lol. The mastodon instance I use is social.lol, which is also a service of omg.lol. Personally I think it's the best mastodon instance. Album lists are currently hosted on Album Whale and song lists by MusicThread. Stats are tracked by Umami by me personally.

I write most things on my MacBook Air, either directly in Scribbles or in Obsidian (for the longer posts). Occasionally things will start on the go, on my iPhone but that's more rare these days. When it happens though, Obsidian is what gets used.

Autocorrect keeps wanting to change the title to "changeling" and maybe that's appropriate as things have changed. A lot. I'm going to try to let this be as accurate as possible of a record of those changes and what I've used and done to blog over the years.

Current

• 2024-07-03: Added a fediverse creator tag per example here
• 2024-07-06: Added an /ai slash page.
• 2024-07-22: Added a Concerts page
• 2024-08-10: Added Community Echoes into the Post Template
• 2024-08-19: See changes outlined here
• 2024-09-08: Changed the upvote button to a star and centered it.

Early 2000s

• I originally did a Mambo blog (if anyone remembers that CMS) hosted in student space provided by my university I believe. I wasn't too much of a fan though and started my own tinkering:
  • I dabbled with creating a flash gallery style site at one point.
  • At one point I created my own PHP blog script.
• I eventually created my own Rails blog that was fun to do. It lasted longer than the others above.

Mid 2000s

• If memory serves me, this time period was mostly the aforementioned rails app with an eventual move to self-hosted Wordpress on shared hosting.

2010 - 2018ish

• Shared hosting with Wordpress was kind of a nightmare in this time period. If one install on a shared host got taken down, the others would as well. I got tired of dealing with it so I started exploring SaaS options.
  • Posterous I liked a lot because you could just email in and it seemed really nice. Sadly it went the way of the dinosaur.
  • Posthaven was similar and I used it for quite awhile. There thing was "your site will be online forever" and mine, at the posthaven subdomain, still is. It's an interesting trip down memory lane. I might move some posts over to my updated site but only where I'm confident I'd write it again today.
• I eventually settled on svbtle which is a nice low-key platform I used for quite awhile.

2018ish - Today

• Life got...interesting and blogging needs morphed and changed. I basically began to split needs between job related thoughts on one domain and more personal processing on this one, wand3r.net. Up until this point, everything was on a single domain which I no longer use or maintain.
• I used Micro.blog for awhile. It worked OK for my blogging purposes and I liked the idea of a community as well. I never really felt like I fit there though and eventually moved away.
• From Jan 2023 til Late April 2024 I used weblog.lol
• Weblog.lol is awesome and flexible and worth a consideration but I found the work involved inhibited my ability to write - I wanted something that promoted writing. When Scribbles released, I tried it and really enjoyed the experience. I feel like my site is better organized then it's ever been.
• I wanted something a little more customizable so have now landed on Bearblog.dev.