It’s been a year since I’ve blogged on my personal website. And it was six months before that since I’d posted and six months before that since the previous post. Three posts in two years, does not a blog make. I didn’t even remember to write about the completion of my sci-fi trilogy last summer (Hey! The Tin Whistle is out, the trilogy is complete! Read it now).

So it’s time to face facts. For all practical purposes, I don’t have a “blog” anymore. I have a website. Once that was clear, then I knew I needed to spruce things up. So that’s what this new look is. I put the books front and center. The homepage currently features my most recent novels, the complete Lattice Trilogy. And when I get my next book out, that’s what will be featured there instead.

Will I still be blogging? Maybe. It seems like the kind of thing I’d do—redesign my site away from the blog and then find the spark to blog again. But most likely it will remain sporadic. At best.

But, as many have observed, blogging has fundamentally changed.

“Podcasting is the new blogging” is one reason for it. I love podcasting. I got the podcasting bug with Media Carnivores, which we ran for three years. Now I started a podcast network and talk about the local Tacoma arts scene. (I will also say that I got my wife started on podcasting as well—she now has more podcasts than I do! The Miss Fisher Philes covers the world of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (an Australian show currently streaming Netflix) and the Miss Adventure Podcast, a show about travel.)

The other reason, of course, is that social media has sapped a lot of the energy out of blogging. Why write 100 words about an article you like when you can write 100 characters and tweet it? Why blog about your trip when you can share the photos to Instagram? I’m not immune to that trend. Here are my Twitter and Instagram handles if you want to follow me there.

That said, I am heartened to see that there is a slow rekindling of interest in blogging. As the massive tech companies have started to show the perils of relying on them for communication, the idea of independent blogs sounds a little more attractive.

So, again, I don’t see myself returning to being a blogger who posts several times a day like I did 12 years ago. But maybe now that I’ve got a site I’m a lot happier with, I might be a little more interested in posting.