Am I Blogging Or Not?

The sort of existential crisis I’ve been having lately about blogging happens to be coincident with the controversies over Automattic’s various deals to provide data for purchase, sometimes for the purposes of A.I. training with sketchy and somewhat hidden methods of opting out, and that’s not helping any as I try to engage in some self-reflection and make some decisions.

There’s a mini-exodus from WordPress happening due to the latter situations over the sense of broken trust and the waste they put to a couple decades of general goodwill. To consider doing so myself runs into two, daunting issues.

First, WordPress is the more direct method to accomplishing the blog restoration project should I choose to continue with it, even if I just use it as a stopgap to get everything restored and then migrate things to something else. Second, this domain comes free from an Automattic program for bloggers and if I had to pay for it on the open market it would run something like $1,500 per year.

Moving to something else, whether now or later, comes with its own rather dramatic hurdles for me, primarily due to the face that I have all that weird, custom stuff from ChatGPT that handles things like variables in category descriptions and the very important “internal backlinks” functionality.

The idea of sticking with WordPress wearies me greatly, as does the prospect of having to make things work in something else. I’m very much right now in the state of mind to imagine an entirely new blogging system that doesn’t exist but if it did I’d consider just shitcanning everything to date and starting over. That, too, comes with its own weariness, however. The idea of just taking everything offline in a reboot itself makes me feel claustrophobic. It almost would have been better had I never done any blogging before now at all.

Should I continue with the restoration project, I’d set a due date of March 20, 2025. That’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the earliest blog post I’ve been able to locate. It’s very possible, if we get that far, that in addition to the restoration due date that would be the reboot date: I’d stow the restored two and a half decades in one place, and start fresh somewhere else.

I’ve made no decisions, because it’s exhausting just trying to thinkg all these things through, especially as I’m in the middle of several weeks of a surge in what my new primary care physician now officially labelled as ME/CFS. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know how to make the decision.