There have always been shifts in how I use this blog. When I started it I wanted to be part of a community of knitting bloggers. It was soon obvious that I wasn’t going to get the visitor numbers my favourite bloggers enjoyed, so I decided the blog would be a record of my creative projects. After a few years it changed from a knitting blog to an anything crafty blog. Later, when I got rid of my art website, I made a little gallery of art pics in the menus, which allowed me to show them to people on my phone.

I’m amazed that I’m still here nineteen years later. So many blogs have disappeared. I signed up to two blog aggregate apps to help me follow other blogs only to have them expire. I’ve signed up to various social media and whenever they turned bad or fizzed out I’ve always thought: “at least I have the blog”.

However, in recent years I’m finding the shine has slowly worn off blogging. For as start, I’m crafting less now that art is my main pastime. Then there’s the general enshittification of the internet, from unreliable email to AI data scraping that just make the online world a source of risk and frustration. I’ve been reducing and simplifying my online presence for a while, and that had to lead to me contemplating closing down creativefidget.com eventually.

There are some aspects of blogging that I won’t miss. Like the pressure to constantly make stuff worth blogging about. Like paying for a domain name and an ISP to host it.

I can keep a project logbook without having it public. I can keep a diary, if the urge to write regularly remains. I don’t need to have pictures of my art here when I can store them on my phone anyway.

The title of this post started as a question. As often happens, writing is the path to discovering the answer.

I think yes, it is time.