Welcome to v12n.io

I've been blogging now for a little over 10 years. Like email providers, cars, shoes, laptops and hair styles (maybe not the hair, that never changes) I have tried new approaches to blogging over time. Usually my blogging activities have moved for one of the following reasons:

1. My hosting provider got too expensive and unreliable
2. The site or blog I was using didn't align to my personal branding requirements
3. To keep some of my skills fresh and to give myself a challenge

On more than one occasion I have switched the domain or URL that I'm using. These are just a selection of the ones that I have used or tried:

• wekabyte.co.uk
• vspecialist.co.uk
• michaelpoore.com

So why a new blog and why now? My current activities up to this point have been using Wordpress (both self-hosted and SaaS). The domain michaelpoore.com has been mine for quite some time and it seemed sensible to use it so it was easy to find and associate with me. But there are some drawbacks to that approach. My name isn't always easy to type - even I get the "a" and "e" the wrong way around sometimes! Whilst the association to me is obvious, I also wanted something simple and easy to remember that I can make my own.

Through sheer laziness I have been using variations on v12n for my home lab activities for some time now - v12n.local or v12n.lab or v12n.co - as it's easy to write. So I thought that I should formalise it. That explains the URL at least.

Why a new blog and why now? Disclosure time, the last few years haven't been an easy ride. I have strayed from the path of a career that I enjoyed and I am trying to find my way back. And on a personal level I've had some challenges that I'm still working on. Part of my regimen to fix things up is gaining some focus back on the cloud, virtualisation and automation technologies where I have excelled in the past and enjoyed working on. Starting with a clean slate seems like the best way to tackle that.

I do have a back catalog of content on my former blog and I will explore options to migrate some of that across in due course. But really I want to "fix forward". Especially as there's a long game that I hope will become clearer in due course.

The choice of Ghost as a blogging platform has reasons. Wordpress, whilst useful and pretty reliable over the years, has become a bit bloated. I found that I was spending too much time messing with plugins and themes rather than creating useable content. That sort of distratcion I don't need! Ghost is more minimal and aligns well with some other objectives that I have that I'll share later. For the time being I'm using a hosted option but I will be looking in to self-hosting.

Hopefully all of this proves to be a good choice. Time will tell...