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Taking a break from blogging as I know it

My job changed in October and I haven’t felt the urge to blog anything since. I’ve been writing less over the last couple of years or so anyway, mainly because I led a project to develop and productise (sorry) a new library self-service system. This generated a few blog posts, but writing about procurement and budgets isn’t as interesting as writing about atomic CSS or how Uniqlo designed a terrible website header.

My new role formalises the switch from IT and development to (ahem) strategy and includes a hefty element of (cough) marketing. It’s a challenge. Soon, the Suffolk Libraries web presence will probably be developed by people other than me, which is a good thing – providing we choose the right people, and we develop the right stuff. I also now have to think about library signage, planning events etc. and, to be honest, I have next to zero interest in posting about these things at the moment.

I will miss writing HTML, Liquid and CSS for work, although I may continue to dabble in a few simple personal projects, similar to Skinny Guardian and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in HTML, and I’ll still be responsible for whatever Suffolk Libraries ends up serving online. Truth be told, I’ve never been particularly interested in the javascript element of the front end triptych, and the web has fundamentally lurched towards React et al over the last few years. I don’t have the time, or inclination, to learn Angular, Vue or JSX, although that may change. You can only write about Tachyons and how websites get usability wrong for so long (ten years, in my case).

Over the years, I blogged about subjects away from the web, such as Universal Basic Income, the state of the Labour Party and whatever I was reading, and it’s not as if we live in becalmed times. But I just don’t feel qualified to pontificate on, say, Brexit without doing some research. (Having said that: I believe it’ll be a bad thing, and that it’s a cipher for a bunch of worrying beliefs. I’d vote remain again, but we still don’t grasp what voting leave really meant, why people did it and how we deal with all the forces that led us here and where they’re taking us, or even that the EU itself is in a very bad way. Perhaps it won’t exist in ten years.)

I currently read a handful of books a year (two in the past week, though). If I start commuting, maybe that will change and I’ll start blogging about books again. But at the moment, no. I think I need to take a break from the blog before writing something else, and 10 years in, on December 31, seems the best place to start (or end).

That’s all to say we live in interesting times and I could (and maybe should) be blogging, but probably won’t be for the time being. And when I do it’ll be about something else. Or in a different format. Who knows. But goodbye for the time being and thanks for reading ten years of me moaning about the web and the world.
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