For reasons not entirely sorted in my own mind, I’ve decided to start a new writing space on the web. I have my long-standing blog at my website that I’ve mostly used for digital history writing, which I feel is rather pigeonholed into those topics. But I wanted a writing space that feels more freeform and, frankly, frictionless. Since my site runs on Hugo, there’s a kind of friction that exists in writing and deploying – one I could certainly resolve pretty easily, but I just haven’t.

Instead of starting up a new Hugo site or rethinking how I design and write posts on my main site, I’ve decided to start this new venture fully on micro.blog.

So, what is Tack & Ink? I think of this post as defining some contours for the blog. I suspect this site will replace my current (and largely defunct) Buttondown newsletter which always fit a bit uneasily into how and what I wanted to write (that’s not shade against Buttondown, it’s a fantastic service I wish I could figure how to fit into my writing). But, who knows, perhaps writing here means finding a new kind of invigoration for Buttondown.

The idea here is I want to write about a variety of topics. There will be less digital history and more about my historical research and, relatedly, as you’ll see dear reader, our acreage in the tall grass prairies of central Nebraska. The goal here is a combination of things: curation about things I read, with commentary, that I think others will like; improve my skill as an essayist; sharing of historical sources I find interesting; thinking out loud and in public on the open web.