Don’t call it a comeback

I’ve been wanting to get back into writing (consistently) for a long while now, but something has always gotten in the way—work, family issues, my mental health, etc. But now, now I’m ready to get back in the saddle and start writing like I used to. Opinions and prognostications here I come!

Moving away from Medium

As most of you know, I had really high hopes for Medium and for a long time I enjoyed writing Anxious Robot there, but I came to despise the whole “likes” situation, and the inability to turn all of that stuff off.

The final straw was when they stopped allowing new publications to use custom domains, and forced them to use subdomains off of medium.com. At that point I felt the writing was on the wall, and that eventually they’d take that away from those of us who were “grandfather’d” in as well.

(If you never followed me over to the AR Medium publication, I suggest you have a look at the last ~45 posts here; I’m proud of a lot of that writing, and found a seamless way to import it here.)

Moved to…WordPress? How do I follow you?

I thought about going back to Jekyll/S3 (which I put an insane amount of time into a few years ago), and even Gatsby, but ultimately I decided to run WordPress on a VPS via an AWS Lightsail instance.

Good thing about WordPress is that I (used to) have a lot of familiarity with it, wrote plugins for it, etc. Additionally, it’s massively popular and has a kajillion different ways to modify/add to it without too much hassle.

Still subscribed to the polymath.net feed?

You probably don’t need to change anything (I’ve redirected /atom.xml to /feed) and so everything should just work. That said, you might want to just unsubscribe from the old feed and point your aggregator to https://polymath.nethttps://polymath.net/feed.

Coming here from the Medium publication?

You of course can point your aggregator to https://polymath.nethttps://polymath.net/feed, which is probably the best option, as I don’t think I can create a forwarding rule that works for every case.

What about email?

I’m working on this—there are a lot of options.

For a time I was considering using Substack for everything (I even bought justin.substack.com from some random guy), but they’re pretty strict these days about custom domains, and so it really just wasn’t in the cards for me.

FeedBurner’s (RIP) RSS-to-email service was pretty great, and I’m sure there are a lot of services that provide this now (including some from WordPress proper), but I’ve yet to do the research. Once I do, I’ll be sure to make it available for all of you weirdos that don’t use an RSS aggregator. 🙂

Is anything broken?

It probably goes without saying that I’m not fully OK yet with the design/interactions of everything here yet, but I just wanted to get it to a place where I felt comfortable to start posting again. And I have.

If you notice anything wonky please don’t hesitate to ping me on Twitter or email me.