This is not my first blog post…

I decided to start blogging in spring 2018, though I wasn't entirely new to the form, having posted a production diary for my play Salt'n'Sauce in autumn 2006. Rather than journaling, I wanted to explore my enduring interests in writing, the creative process, popular culture, and technology.

I planned to do this in long-form essays, as I missed working on my PhD (completed in 2004), though I still didn't want it to be quite that long-form and academic. I'd set up and maintained several self-hosted WordPress websites, gaining a solid understanding of the platform, which left me well-placed to launch a personal site and start blogging.

So that's what I did, except it seemed ridiculous to begin the new project with 'my first blog post'. I uploaded my first website in 2000 and had work to recycle (I won't diminish my writing by calling it 'content'). But this made for a heap of warmed-over material. I wanted my new venture to reflect the scope of my earlier writing but with a hearty helping of new work. In other words, I wanted to arrive fully formed without having to retake tentative initial steps online.

I installed WordPress and put the site behind a maintenance page, and that's where it has stayed ever since. I've done a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and whenever friends and colleagues ask about my writing, I say I'm working on my 'eternally embryonic blog'. But the new work has never quite reached the critical mass needed to justify dropping the maintenance page — the archival material still looms large.

Part of my reticence was that I wasn't sure how far I'd go with ongoing blogging, and my debut post might also be my last. The protracted dry run, however, has proved that I have no difficulty committing to the writing. Most of what I've 'published' behind the maintenance page has taken many weeks to research, write, and polish. My most recent epic, a tripartite exploration of using AI in writing, has taken me from July to November 2025 and remains stubbornly a work in progress.

When bouncing a draft of this off the leading chatbots, Microsoft's Copilot offered to rewrite the whole thing for another platform — Substack or Medium, perhaps. Since Copilot was unforthcoming about why I might need this, I turned to ChatGPT. It explained that posts on other platforms could serve as shorter, more conversational complements to my work on my WordPress site.

I asked what alternative platforms it recommended, and it suggested Ghost. Despite its specific server environment requirements, I'd enjoyed dabbling with Ghost in the past and decided to set up this secondary site.

The answer to slow blogging, it seems, is more blogging. My posts here will provide the vital signs behind the more ponderous posts on my main website, as I finally defibrillate the maintenance-page flatline in January 2026.