Remember the good old days of blogging? Or even before that when it was just called updating my site frequently? It was a simpler time without walled gardens or the need to have an account on a service just to leave a comment. Information was free, open, and easily consumable.

(Takes in breath of fresh nostalgia)

Andy Baio recently redesigned waxy.org and penned an excellent post lamenting the state of independent blogging. He puts it far more eloquently than I ever could.

But there a few reasons why I'm sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they're still worth fighting for.

Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.

Last week, Twitter announced they're shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It's not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There's no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can't say, and I have complete control over the way it's displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

Yes. That.

I wholeheartedly support all those that still run their own sites and haven't moved to Facebook/Tumblr/Medium.