The personal website of Matt Henderson.
26 January 2015
For the past several years, the main outlets for my postings were Twitter and here at the Dafacto website. Today that changed.
Twitter’s a great place for content that’s temporal in nature. On the other hand, I’d prefer that the content posted here at Dafacto—my personal website—is generally a little more timeless; perhaps still relevant in five years. And content my kids might benefit from reading someday.
So between what’s appropriate for Twitter and what’s appropriate for my website, there exists a large category of content that’s too long for Twitter, but too temporal or inappropriate for Dafacto. This includes rants, tips, jokes, moment-in-time photos and stuff like that. And until now, all that content has ended up by necessity here.
I was talking with my friend Alex Bendiken about this the other day. I had begun experimenting with posting such temporal content using the “notes” feature of Droplr. While I enjoyed the feature’s light-weight and ease of use, I wasn’t comfortable in not having it indexed, and not having it under my control.
Alex suggested Tumblr, but I’ve tried Tumblr before and wasn’t happy with it. There’s too many social hooks for my liking, and it wasn’t pleasant to wake up one day and find new buttons appearing on my site that the Tumblr team had suddenly decided would be a good idea.
That led to a short-lived discussion about whether there was space for another micro-blogging platform to serve this purpose. We agreed there wasn’t, but during that discussion Alex observed that most of my posts are rants, and so perhaps if such a platform did exist, it could be called Rantbox.
I really liked the name, and the .io form was available, so I decided to grab it and launch a WordPress blog to serve this particular role, for me.
And with that, I’m happy to announce the launch of Rantbox.io!
I’ll tweet most of what gets posted to Rantbox, but if you want to follow along via RSS, you can easily subscribe to the rantbox.io RSS feed with your feed reader.
For the geeks:
It’s been a while since I setup a new website, and it’s great to see that the process is so easy these days. In my shared hosting account at DreamHost, I created a new WordPress site in about five minutes with their 1-click installer. I then enabled JetPack and connected it with my account at WordPress.com, as well as enabling the markdown module.
I installed the WP Super Cache and Yoast Google Analytics plugins, and added the site to my Google Analytics account. I also installed the Disqus plugin for comments, and connected it to my Disqus account. Finally, I enabled and configured the Twenty Fifteen theme—delivered with the default WordPress install—which seemed light-weight, responsive and appropriate for my needs.
All in all, I went from domain registration to site-up-and-running in about an hour’s time! (It’s a pity I couldn’t do the domain registration itself at DreamHost, but they don’t support .io domains. So for that, I used OpenSRS.)
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