Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that's all I want it to be. It's the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.—Bill Watterson. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

To cut the to chase: I'm not planning on updating this blog for a bit. If you want to read what I'm writing now, I recommend visiting:

1. The Civitas Community where I write about community building.
2. Meta Jon where I write about topics that I'm interested in with no particular goal in mind.

This blog started as a place for me to write about my work at Stack Exchange without needing to worry about getting approval. I've written 222 posts¹ about everything from supporting small communities to my favorite board games. I'm incredibly proud of my output and I'd love to keep working on it. So why am I taking a break?

I guess the big issue is that I can't justify writing my blog now that I have a business to run. Writing about community on my business' community platform might conceivably help me pay my bills, but this blog is just a step too far from that imperative. It's a luxury I can't currently afford.

One of the things I love about this blog is that it serves static pages. As a result, it's quite responsive:

If people want to respond to what I write, they need to log into my personal Discourse instance. Because the site needs to be built from data in the database, the performance isn't as snappy:

The upside, of course, is that people can respond without moving to a new site. And I can use all the features of Discourse to do interesting things such as create architecture diagrams. In the past I would have worked on adding those features to my blog as a hobby. Now I'm learning how to help clients by exploring Discourse.

This post was inspired by Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary about Calvin & Hobbes. I highly recommend it!

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1. Not counting this one or my drafts! ↩