First

I often find myself writing fairly substantial mail messages, posts or comments to posts, which inevitably get lost. This is a way to keep some of them, I hope.

I’ve resisted anything like this because it involves one of two things:

• keeping my information in a system run and owned by some third party, which system and third party will at some point change beyond recognition, vanish, start trying to sell me things or do some combination of these things;
• running and maintaining a complex and probably insecure system which is visible to the entire internet.

Neither of these options is very attractive.

There is a third way: if you’re willing to give up features like comments (and why would I care what anyone else thinks?) then it’s possible to create a blog using only static data, which minimises the risk and pain. This is what I’m now doing, using Frog. The worst case is that Frog goes away and I need to find some other tool: in either case I should be able to avoid losing information.