I spent the better part of my adult working life with the job title of technical writer (or some variation). I spent much of that time as a freelancer and contractor. To keep pace with technology, I became an inveterate tinkerer,, so I kept a large web presence beyond my LinkedIn profile and website.

It’s finally time for me to change up my personal web presence:

Websites

I’ve taken willkelly.com offline as I rebrand it away from being the website of a technical writer and sometimes journalist. When I canceled my Squarespace account, it was an odd feeling of closing the door of a chapter of my professional life. The next iteration of willkelly.com will move to either WordPress or Drupal and focus on my current professional brand.

My blog will stay put here at willkelly.blog and I feel another burst of personal writing coming that I hope to publish in the upcoming weeks.

Wikis and other collaboration tools

Back in the day, I used to cover collaboration and project management tools as a freelancer. It made it hard to not try out every new tool even long after I stopped covering the topic. Since starting my new job, I took down my MediaWiki, TikiWiki, and DokuWiki instances. I don’t need them, so it was time to remove the management overhead of keeping those platforms secure and online.

I’ve ditched my instance of Atlassian Cloud. It didn’t help that the company was rude to me during my last job hunt, but since I’m not working in a Confluence shop, it was time to downgrade to the free version until I can sort the files I stored up there.

My one license seat of Microsoft 365 will continue as my project archives for the foreseeable future.

I used the free tier of Basecamp to manage my last job hunt. It’s staying. While I’m not freelancing or even doing any other side hustle that could always change.

Another platform I’m keeping is P2 from Automattic for some same reasons why I’m keeping Basecamp.

Final word

COVID-19 has given me extra time to think about my future web presence and take action on it.