On this day, one hundred and forty-four (a.k.a. one gross) months ago, I published the very first post on this blog, marking my official entry into the blogosphere.

While it might be accurate to say that the present state of my blog is moribund because I have written only 4 posts in the past 2 years, I still consider vaes⁹ to be a living part of my online presence—a personal space where I am free to say what I want without accepting some social network’s terms of use or granting a commercial company an irrevocable license to use my content as it sees fit. In fact, I have recently moved the blog to its own domain name, vaes9.com, after staying on vaes9.codedgraphic.com for the past 10 years and on vaes9.aswalk.net before that.

I’ll freely admit that ever since I became active on Facebook and previously with Plurk, and after I got more involved with offline activities in the local Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap communities, my personal blogging took a hit. I used to be able to write multiple entries in a month. Now, I am posting articles hundreds of days in between. There’s only so much I can do with my limited time after all. And with the ease of posting on mobile Facebook with its ready audience on hand to like your written stream of consciousness, crafting a fine blog article is a chore in comparison. (I actually used to post entries on my blog like how I would nowadays post on Facebook. Case in point: this Twitter-length blog post to celebrate this blog’s first anniversary.)

Why continue blogging? Why not preserve this blog as a digital archive of a bygone era, when blogs were the kings of the Web and social media was not yet mainstream? Well, aside from the aforementioned freedom from commercial interests, I think blogs are still the proper media for publishing long-form content—the type of writing where you think your thoughts through, where you do prior research, and where you polish your text as if you are writing for a magazine or a newspaper column. My philosophy is thus: social networks are reserved for the viral and mundane, while blogs are for the considered and profound.

Now, the only problem is finding the time to write.