The Julipedia turns 11 years today. And it is time to let it go. This is not a decision I made lightly; in fact, this post was started at the beginning of March and I purposely let it sit until the blog’s birthday to put it out.

Some history

Back in 2004, the Blogosphere blossomed (maybe even earlier). Everyone had to have a personal blog where they posted frequently. I, of course, had to give them a try and, during peak exams season, set myself up a space in LiveJournal known as “jmmv’s weblog” and started writing. I can’t believe 11 years have passed since then; feels like yesterday.

About a year later, Blogger had gained some traction, in particular because it finally had a built-in commenting system. So I migrated and around that time, renamed the blog to The Julipedia – the name that has maintained until today. Having access to the blog’s posts chronologically is useful, as I could trivially dig up this information.

Things have changed a lot in 11 years. Blogs are not the cool thing these days. People communicate in different ways. OK, let me reword that: personal blogs are just not a thing any more and so this one has to be put down. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the chonological ordering that does not work: people don’t closely follow blogs any longer so the fact that the posts are ordered by date does not help them. People find posts from links in social media or as part of search results. And when they land on the blog, they quickly skim through the post and leave. At least on Blogger, I have never been able to get more engagement than that. Organic traffic does not lead to returning visitors these days.

I am well aware that there is a lot of (I think) useful content in this blog, and I am actually quite proud of a small bunch of my essays. I am well aware that I will need to continue writing because I enjoy it. But I don’t feel a blog is the best option these days.

Alternatives

Part of this decision is the personal desire to host the blog elsewhere, say using Wordpress or something like Jekyll. Migrations are truly hard and I am not sure I would be happy with the result.

Surfacing content in a blog is hard: yes, posts can be found through Google, but the occasional blogger that will land on the blog’s front page will hardly know where to go. There are some possibilities to fix that, but none of them have worked in my case (possibly due to Blogger’s simplistic interface).

I think going back to the basics of having a personal website may work better to host all kinds of content in a more structured way. Twitter can later be used to surface new content or to reshow old content.

Or, actually, finding new homes for most posts may be better. In fact, many of the posts I ended up writing in my blog recently do not belong in it because they are not “essays”: they are announcements for the projects I own, and such announcements belong on the project’s mailing lists. For example: the reason the Engineering Kyua blog never really worked is because I felt a conflicting need to post elaborate essays on my personal blog because I knew they would have more audience. However, such posts never belonged there: they ought to have been posted on Kyua’s site instead. Shutting down this blog will force me to put the content where it belongs, and then maybe linking it from elsewhere to create a personal portfolio.