Anthony's Science Blog

A short reflection on 10 years of blogging

May 21, 2018 – 1:33 pm

The blog has been down for a while due to technical difficulties but I’m now thrilled to have it back up and running. It’s previous home, The Artifex, a homegrown server run by my good friend Hunter Blanks had to move on from being able to support a WordPress blog. I am most grateful to Hunter for being generous enough to host it there for its first 10 years! The main issue was security concerns, which was also a roadblock when I looked into having the blog hosted at UTEP. I guess WordPress security is a hassle and no one wants to deal with it! Fortunately I’ve found an affordable third party host that’s working well and has provided good customer service to boot. I think of the internet as having an unforgiving permanence to it, but apparently this is not so for dynamically generated content like a WordPress blog. One day I’d like to make sure to archive everything in a more permanent way.

Here’s my thoughts on doing occasional blogging over a 10-year period. When people ask about it, the first thing I tell them is that it’s a lot of work! Writing a decent post requires some effort and several rounds of self-editing if you don’t want it to suck. It’s not like facebook or twitter or reddit where you can crank out a first draft of your thoughts and it’s fine and it’s no work and it fits right in (at least I can’t do that). Blogs need more thought behind them, which is a strength of the medium. Weirdly for me, I feel like I’ve now seen blogs come and go as a trend on the internet, though I think they will always have their niche as an intermediate type of content somewhere between the level of polish seen on stream of consciousness social media and more formal publication media like scientific journals or journalism outlets.

One thing I like about blogs is being able to edit old content. I can always go back and change an awkward sentence or a factual error or a bad joke and the next person who finds that post won’t be subjected to it. In fact in having to go back and correct some hyperlinks with this new home for the blog, I fixed a few of these sorts of things. Although blogging is a real time commitment and I have to be careful with time allocation for any project in my job, I’m looking forward to sharing some new thoughts here on the usual topics of ecology and statistics, as well as some ideas on teaching, which is something I now have a few years experience doing here at UTEP. And so with that, onward to the next 10 years of Anthony’s Science Blog!