Welcome Back
Date: 13 April 2019
Welcome back to the new and improved Music Free Static! Things are a little different around here and it’s not just the color. Let me go through some of the changes with you.
What’s New
Ramblings Returns
Music Free Static was originally spawned from my personal blog which named PerlStalker’s Ramblings. I’ve decided to resurrect my personal blog in the form of the Ramblings section of the site. This will be place to post my random thoughts, writing, or other things that spark my fancy.
Music Free Tech Gets Rebooted
One of the changes I made a long, long time ago was to spin off my systems administration and tech posts into their own site. That made a lot of sense when Music Free Static was all politics all the time. I later started the Music Free Tech podcast, first, as a segment on the Music Free Static podcast and then, later, as its own podcast.
As part of the reboot of MFS, I decided that I wanted to consolidate all of my sites into one under the Music Free Static name. To that end, my sysadmin notes now live in the Tech section. It is my intention to add more sysadmin-y things there as well as other commentary on tech topics.
More Privacy
I’ve removed all of the tracking things from this site including the Google Analytics and Add This widgets. There may still be a few third party things that track you including the embedded videos, tweets, and other media. I’ve done what I could to minimize what those embedded features track while maintaining the usability of the site. You can read more about it in my cookie policy.
Mobile Friendly
As you might guess from the look of the site, my web design skills are pretty minimal. Still, I’ve made every effort to make Music Free Static as usable as possible on mobile devices.
What’s Gone
No More Politics (Mostly)
When I moved PerlStalker’s Ramblings to Music Free Static, it become the home of my political blog and podcast. I ended the podcast at the end of 2015 and got almost completely out of politics. I was burnt out and the world of politics in America and online is so vile and so toxic that it was damaging my mental health. As I write this, it’s been three years since I left the political blogosphere and I’m still trying to overcome the negative effects.
When it came time to reboot the blog, I decided to scrub all of the politics from the site. There may be a day when I regularly post about politics again, but it is not this day. There may be times when there’s something I just have to get off my chest. Those posts will end up in the Ramblings section. I expect those posts to be few and far between.
As mentioned above, I will write about tech from time to time. In some cases, it’s hard to discuss something without, at least, a mention of how the tech and politics interact. I will attempt to keep things civil and I expect all of you to do the same.
Goodbye Comments
When it came time to reboot this site, I thought long and hard about what I wanted to have here. As previously mentioned, I dropped the political stuff. I also decided to get rid of the comments. I did this for a couple of reasons.
First, I wanted to remove Diqus from the site as a part of the process to make my site more privacy friendly.
Second, I am generally disgusted by the garbage and spam that so frequent festers in the comments of so many sites. The comments are too often used to harass the poster rather than to provide constructive feedback or to have a discussion.
That said, there is something to be said for having a place for a community to gather and chat. To that end, I have created sub-reddits for MFS, Music Free Tech, and Music Free Gaming where posts can be discussed and community members can post new topics. I fully expect these forums to be a place where we can all “Be excellent to each other” and will not hesitate to ban people who I feel are toxic to the community.