Hello hobby, my old friend

A very interesting and, frankly, cathartic thing happened.

Many years ago I ran a blog for an analog hobby. It became quite popular, and I had amassed 1000 Twitter followers on the related account.

If you think that number is uninspiring, consider that this happened over 3 years, driven by reviewing items for a somewhat niche hobby. So I consider it quite an achievement, especially since this coding blog has only acquired 641 Twitter followers over 5 years, and there are a lot more devs than niche hobbyists!

But I don't mean to sound vain or shallow. These metrics do matter to some extent, because it feels good to know that my opinions have touched people in a positive way.

It also goes to prove that hobbies and interests are weird - it's hard to predict which ends up "viral", or when.

Back to the story...

I moved on to other things and the hobby fell to the wayside.

The blog ran on Blogspot/Blogger - it still does to this day.

On a whim, I decided to check if the .com is available. Lo and behold, it was!

I had to make a quick decision. I thought I should buy the domain even if I sat on it, because it's part of my legacy and a testament to the hard work I had put into that blog. So I did the right thing and bought the domain.

At the same time I was analyzing the feasibility of migrating everything over from Blogspot to the new domain. It wouldn't be easy, but it felt doable.

Combined with a growing desire to become reacquainted with my old hobby, and also wishing to preserve all the hard work I had put into it, I decided to rebuild the blog on the fresh new domain, on a new engine to boot. It's quite an undertaking.

The blog engine is all sorted out - it will be a static site built on Laravel Jigsaw. In fact it will reuse a lot of the code driving this very blog, with an original coat of paint and different design of course.

But the biggest challenge will be to migrate the Blogspot content (XML) to markdown. I think I have solutions for that as well.

The other pieces of the puzzle were regaining access to: the Blogspot account (I forgot the sign-in email), the associated email address itself, the Twitter account, and Disqus (which drives the comments of which there are over 1000).

After all these years I lost track of all these accounts, but the good news is that I was able to systematically regain control of all of them.

I have intentionally avoided giving specifics about the hobby, the blog name, or the domain. There will be a time for that later, but for now I just wanted to share the excitement of once again being the master of my own work.