Welcome to Bluesky Country

Oh, hi.

This is the first day of the rest of my blog, I suppose. I've been running a Salon blog since June of 2004. Salon has decided to do some "restructuring" (read: bored with blogs now, thanks for your time, last one out please turn out the lights.) As part of the restructure, the future of the Salon blog community is uncertain. In any event, I need to find another port to call home. Salon's blogs run on a hideous platform called Radio Userland. (When I describe this, you will laugh and wonder if I'm making it all up.)

In order to post to a Radio blog or do anything to it (upload a photo, change the blogroll), you need to run the Radio program, a huge unwieldy piece of software, on your desktop. After five minutes or so, which might as well be accompanied by Tardis-style sound effects, you're up and running. Then, after you write and publish your post, you just have to wait ten minutes while it "floats up to the cloud" (I swear to almighty God that's the official terminology), and voila, you've got an updated blog! Unless Radio hiccups. In which, start over again.

So, as you can imagine, the concept of just opening a page in a browser and writing a post is pretty wild to me.

There were other problems: browser compatibility problems, Radio functionality problems (cloudbursts, as it were). Plus the license fee. Yeah, that's right, kiddos - once upon a time, it made sense to charge people for the ability to run a blog.

So now what's going to happen is that my former blog is going to essentially waste away. Once the license fee comes due, I won't renew it because it doesn't make sense. When the blogs were actively being promoted by Salon, most of the appeal wore off. Sure, we were still technically part of Salon, but the page views we were once virtually guaranteed were gone. So, like Billy Joel said, I'm moving on. Or moving out. Er ... moving.

I'll be cross-posting entries here and on the original Too Much Blue Sky blog for a while. Eventually, once the Salon blogs disappear or my Radio membership terminates, I'll switch here full-time. In the meantime, if you want to get to know me, go to the old blog and look through the history. I'll try to keep this updated on a semi-regular basis. Cheers.