Things aren’t looking like they used to here. Yesterday I finally flipped the switch on the new site, then I went to bed. It’s by far the most low-key launch I’ve done in years, but it shouldn’t be. This is my online home, my corner of the web, and while I never forgot about the difference between participating on a social network and actually publishing a site of your own, I didn’t exactly live it, did I?
That’s going to change now. TDH.se is my primary place to publish things. That means that if a photo’s going up on my Instagram, it’ll have a permanent home here first. That has actually been true for some time – just about all photos are in a journal entry before they go anywhere else – but this is more of a statement.
Speaking of the journal entries, they’re still here, a part of the blog section, forming some sort of log. It’s a wink to the old days, when blogs were personal things. You talked about your day, snapped a photo of dinner, shared little nuggets – that sort of thing that social media has been so good at nibbling at. Although I must confess that I was never part of that particular blogging scene, and I’ll keep the private stuff on about the same level as I have thus far.
This site is a work in progress. I went through several revisions before uttering the magic words – “fuck it” – and just publish the thing. The site should work in just about every modern browser, although I doubt link colors are behaving in Internet Explorer (not to be mixed up with Microsoft’s Edge which is perfectly fine). I might get around to fix that, I might not, they’re in CSS variables so that’s the reason for that particular issue. On the other hand, if you’re on Internet Explorer you really should get a modern browser.
I might also go the Divide & Conquer route and serve something completely different to Internet Explorer users. Go ahead, try it in an old IE browser and see what you get.
I’ve done some housekeeping. There’s a revised, if not finished, about page, and a more traditional colophon if you want to know what’s running this thing. I also added a /now page which I’ll try to keep up to date, and there’s a policy statement which also needs some love but at least it exists. I updated the setup page too, while I was at it.
I don’t track you, and I don’t set cookies. There are no Facebook pixels or Google Analytics. That was an important decision to me.
I don’t think the design surprises anyone. I went through a couple of iterations on that, as mentioned, but in the end I felt everything was just in the way of the words. So this is yet another really simple, typography-driven site by yours truly. I do intend to properly leverage the block editor (yes, still running WordPress, in case you haven’t popped over to the colophon yet) for dedicated landing pages and other things, but there’s not much of that here just yet.
So yeah, I think that’s about it? I have a lot of things left on my todo list, mostly nice to haves, but some are more important than others. Displaying photos somehow is one of those. At times, I shoot a lot, and I have a couple of sets that I want to do, and show too, for that matter. It might actually end up being a section on its own, we’ll see. Blog posts with nice looking galleries would do too.
All that said, I hope you’ll appreciate my return to blogging, if you will. I was in the middle of it when blogs exploded, writing and editing the Blog Herald among other things, and I’ve missed it. People keep saying that blogs are coming back, but they never left, social media just ate some of those posts. I think our infatuation with social media is coming to an end, the backlash is already here, and that’ll change the online publishing landscape yet again. More on that another time. For now, welcome to my blog! I hope you’ll like it.
PS. There’s an issue of my personal newsletter going out at the end of the month. Do subscribe if you like, it’s free.
PPS. Found a bug? Email me at tdh at tdh dot se and let me know. Thanks!