The Butt Ugly Weblog

OK so I have been on vacation for three weeks now (yes, it's the dreaded European vacation, which is one of the things keeping us happier than most – no, all – other countries)! Personally I find it very useful in giving my brain the freedom to tackle non-essential things.

Like updating this blog.

It's basically been neglected for a few months now (and the actual layout and stuff has been neglected for 20 years!) So I embarked on some light cleanup: I removed a ton of obsolete web metadata stuff and embraced new standards; the RSS feed now has actual proper titles and images for blog posts; the Feedblitz stuff was fixed; the canonical URL for this site is now "ecyrd.com" instead of "www.ecyrd.com"; and most importantly, I created a whole new landing page.

For 23 years, I just forwarded everyone landing on ecyrd.com directly to this blog. No more! There's now a proper landing page with links, my picture, etc. It's like I'm joining the self-promoting hustle culture, just 25 years late to the party!

Seriously though... With the enshittification of all the platforms, and the fact that if you build your online brand on someone else's platform, you can quickly lose it, makes me want to embrace the blogging culture and self-run websites again. Not that I have much of a brand, but I have a feeling stuff like this is going to be more commonplace. If you own your own domain, you should build your identity there, not on Meta platforms, probably. They're fine, but be ready for the moment you need to abandon them.

Of course running your own site is a lot more trouble. But at some point you have to ask, how much trouble your online presence is worth?