Finally, I’m home. It’s been a long journey but now I should have found the right place to stay. For a rather long time I had believed that what matters when you write online is what you write, not where you write it. Don’t get me wrong, what you write is still the most important thing, but having a consistent identity and online presence are factors that can help, a lot. I can see that in many of the people I read on a daily basis. So, after two blogs (The Rizland Observer, started in 2007 and then merged in The Quillink Observer in 2010) hosted on the free WordPress.com blogging platform, I decided it was time to register a domain and pay for a Web space. For that, I have to publicly thank my friend Grant Hutchinson for his guidance and assistance, because with all the domain & hosting offers and options available, I didn’t really know where to begin.

And here I am, rebooting, after three intense weeks using every spare moment I had after work, to redesign, customise and set up this place to my tastes. There were moments in which I felt frustrated and had to learn a bit of CSS and PHP to get some things the way I wanted to, but I think it’s been worthwhile. At this point perhaps some of you are asking themselves if I just dropped The Quillink Observer and left it behind on a whim simply because I wanted a prettier space to write in. Although I do think this is a prettier space than my previous blog(s); although it felt liberating to finally be able to customise all the parts of a blog installation and have my very own contact email, etc., the main reasons why I made this decision are, a) I wanted a place that I own, and b) I wanted to get even more serious with my online writing — that is, writing more and maybe having a small financial return in the process.

To better understand what I mean, you should read Own your Identity, a post Marco Arment wrote in his blog a week ago, which I found quite serendipitous and which gave me enough motivation to go on while I was setting up morrick.me. The first paragraphs are essential, and Marco nails it with his usual clarity and conciseness:

It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago.

In many ways, we’re better off now: publishing online is far easier, less time-consuming, and more accessible than it has ever been, which has brought content, voices, and consumers online that wouldn’t have been otherwise.

But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity.

If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service.

Collateral changes

Over the last few years, I’ve been opening accounts and creating blogs & tumblelogs for every idea or project that seemed good at the time. I admit to having accumulated a lot, a lot of (free) web places that are now frozen, abandoned, neglected. So while it may seem that with this website I’m adding one more place for you to follow, I’m actually getting rid of all that debris. Now you can see the currently active side-projects on the Projects page.

There has been an important (ex)change in URLs between two of my tumblelogs I think it’s important to point out, because you’ll have to change your bookmarks. If you were following The Quillink notebook, that was the supplement for The Quillink Observer, you’ll still be able to. Only now it’s called The Quillink annotated and works as a supplement for this site. For URL coherency, I changed its address from http://quillink.tumblr.com/ to http://morrick.tumblr.com/. Anyway, at the old address you should find a warning that will redirect you to the updated site.

Thanks for reading, now go to the Front Page and start exploring!