2024i1, Monday: Welcome, home.

It's been too quiet around the Scott-Joynt online homestead.

There are personal reasons (good or otherwise I'll leave you to judge when I finally get round to setting them out).

But one other reason is friction. Maintaining both a Wordpress site (at https://remoteaccessbar.com) and a Substack (https://remoteaccessbar.substack.com) is a pain. Cross-posting only takes a few minutes, but it's often minutes I don't feel like I have.

Another is the name. "Remote Access Bar" made sense when I started the site(s) back in the Plague Years: working remotely as a barrister was still new and weird, and some of the old-fangled habits of the profession were particularly at odds with the new realities. And it worked for a good deal of the initial content, which dealt directly with things like bundling in a PDF world.

But as more and more of what I wrote left that zone - organically, not as a result of any active decision - the name became less and less apposite.

Much more recently, the whole "Substackers against Nazis" thing (a good analysis of which is here) has been bothering me. I'm a microscopic drop in the Substack universe, and don't imagine I'll ever be in a position to flick the switch to try to monetise what I write here. (Of course, that could conceivably change. Some time. But it'd be quite a different universe in which it did.) So whether I stick with Substack or go somewhere else won't move anyone's dial. But I don't have to stay in someone's backyard if I don't like the company.

Finally, I'm already paying something towards keeping a site running. Might as well pay a bit (not much) more and have everything in one place. Laziness FTW.

So here we are. A new domain name, a new host (Ghost, which thus far has made everything pretty easy - with a single exception to be discussed in a moment), less friction... and the possibility that I might actually put finger to keyboard on occasion.

The exception? Ghost has let me import all my posts from Substack, which is great. (Don't need to import them from the remoteaccessbar.com site, since all of them - so far as I recall - were cross-posted.) But a lot of the images have gone awry. I've fixed (roughly) all those which are currently on this site's front page, and I may (no promises) go back and do the others in time too. I've also fixed links within the site. (Again, initially for the visible posts.) Let me know if you run into a broken link or an ugly missing pic, and I'll prioritise any you bring up.

So with that... welcome. To the new home. With a more boring but hopefully more sensible and long-lived domain name. And, please God, with writing muscles renewed. Onward into 2024 and beyond... with love and blessings to all.

[Update, 2024i3: I'd forgotten, when transferring everything across, that in fact the site started in March 2020, and the Substack only followed at the end of that year. So there are a bunch of old site posts which I hadn't transferred. I've done so now - but in the process a bunch of other posts have duplicated themselves. So for the present, there'll be two copies of some old stuff. I'll get the duplicates removed in the coming days, fixing links etc as I go along.]