Way back when Joel Spolsky was a high-profile blogger in the "starting your own software business" genre, I asked him for advice about my blogging, and he replied "Stop what you're doing and get your blog onto your own domain."

I had procrastinated because other platforms made everything so damn easy, and hosting my own blog meant being a part-time web admin. But I took his advice, and set up http://raganwald.com.

Some years after that, Posterous launched on HN, and I gave it a try. It was great, so very convenient! But I carefully kept copies of everything I posed there, and sure enough... One day it closed its doors, and I republished evrything on raganwald.com (some of my urls are raganwald.com/posterous/xxxxx.html, this is why).

But what about all the links to the old posterous articles? All dead, so some threads right here on HN point to dead URLs. This is bad for me and for HN. For this reason, I personally reject the strategy of posting on my own domain and republishing it simultaneously on some other platform. Everything I write is on a domain I control, and if I get less traffic, so be it. Running my own blog on my own low-traffic domain is like running a store in a building I own. The mall is very attractive, but I'm done with landlords.

p.s. There are hosted solutions that respect you your own domain. Some are free, like... Github Pages. And that's what I use. It is not essential that I own the server, just the URLs.

https://github.com/raganwald/raganwald.github.com