If you’re into social networks that don’t want you to pay $8 each month to consume content by far-right idiots, you can now follow this blog on Mastodon. This account will toot out every entry as soon as I click “Publish”.
Tag: Internal
I added a “Follow” button to the sidebar. Clicking it brings you to a new page explaining how to follow websites without social media. Everything old is new again. RSS is back, baby!
It turns out that my new coding skills can be applied to WordPress theming as well. Wow. This blog now has a special style for short posts like this one. đź‘‹
The woes of a personal brand
I detest influencer culture. I’d rather not be a personal brand but a person. As clear-cut as this might sound, it’s virtually impossible to detach one from the other as soon as you’re visible online. By using marcel.io as the domain for my personal blog, I feel like I somehow slid into influencer territory. At the same time it’s the best name for a personal blog written by a human being called Marcel. Oh well.
Since my urge to start blogging again came up, I ogled tiptop.software as the venue for what I want to write about. I’ve spent most of 2022 learning programming, designed, coded and released an app to the App Store and thought it would be great to write about this under the name Tiptop Software. I installed WordPress, build this theme, wrote the first post and even released it.

However I quickly discovered that writing about cats, games and the weather will undoubtedly be something I want to do (you can look forward to that) and it wouldn’t feel right to put more personal topics into a publication hosted by my “software company”. I also don’t want to limit the frequency of posts to make the blog feel valuable. This isn’t supposed to be one of those blogs where every article has to be a work of art. I want to be able to throw out a quick thought and even end a post in the middle of a senten
Empty, digital halls
For me, somebody who has blogged irregularly for more than 15 years, there’s a certain beauty in blogs that have been around and active for decades. Something about a person being able to put that much work into one single project is appealing to me. Grumpy Gamer, Eay and JWZ are just a couple of examples that come to mind.
I didn’t manage to be that consistent and switched domains, blogging software and focus more than once. Only one thing remained true: I love blogs and would very much like to have an active one. In a time where billionaires buy social networks and everyone loses their heads (and potentially their profiles, data, social graph and years worth of content), I want to own a small place to call my own.
So, let’s try this. A fresh start. No old baggage, a simple theme and the very best intentions to fill these empty, digital halls with content for years to come.