Making Some Moves...

A few housekeeping updates to share with you today.

I've recently moved many of my online services, mostly to make myself feel better I guess. I advise other freelancers to "work with clients you like, and avoid the clients you don't." Now I'm expanding that to to the service providers I work with; I don't want to support companies with questionable ethics.

First of all, I have moved this newsletter from Substack to Ghost, a different blogging/newsletter service. You shouldn't see any difference, other than the posts will look a bit nicer. This costs me money at the moment, but it provides a foundation for future growth. So far I'm happier.

My longtime webhosting company Media Temple got their start working with LA's creative community, that's why I liked working with them. I've been to their cool offices in Culver City, and to numerous events over the years. Two years ago they were purchased by GoDaddy – whose ethics and politics are not remotely aligned with mine – and since the beginning of the year have been assimilating MediaTemple into the GoDaddy Borg. So I'm out.

I generally find Server-as-a-Service offerings such as Amazon's AWS or Microsoft Azure to be designed for the most geeky folks out there. They are convenient, but not easy to set up – user hostile comes to mind. 😀

This year I have been experimenting with the Linode cloud computing service for my website, and finally got comfortable enough to commit to running a server there. Since I'm in Japan most of the time now, I set up a server in their Tokyo datacenter; faster for me, but might be a bit slower for folks in the US compared to the previous server in Virginia. Let me know if you notice a difference. I'm still experimenting with this and might move to a California datacenter instead.

Finally is social media, where everything has been in termoil since Elon Musk purchased Twitter. I have moved to Mastodon, where I have several accounts.

I am still syndicating my photos to all the legacy social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, so if you're following me on those services, you'll still see my latest photos. But I do not hangout; I pop in once in a while to check if anything needs my attention. All these social media have been banished to an older "social media iPhone" that stays at home.

I still think RSS syndication (using Reader, NetNewswire, Feedbin, or other RSS reading apps) is the best way to get my latest photos without visiting the website. My RSS feed is here (this will look ugly in a regular web browser).

I've also been toying with the idea of delivering the latest Picture of the Day as a daily email, similar to this newsletter. Is that something you've interested in? Let me know, thanks!