Marco Arment:

If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service.

Truer words have never been spoken. Also:

I’ve always built my personal blog’s content and reputation at its own domain, completely under my control, despite being hosted on many different platforms and serving different roles over the years. It has never been a subdomain of any particular publishing platform or host.

To me this is also essential. In the beginning, Analog Senses was a Tumblr blog, but even then it always had its own domain name, from day one. It’s great that Tumblr lets you use custom domain names, and I’m not sure I would have chosen them to host my blog otherwise.

When the time came and I decided to leave Tumblr and move Analog Senses to a self-hosted Wordpress site, all I needed to do was back up my database, redirect the DNS to point to my new server, import the backup into Wordpress, and after a couple hours of tweaking minor details I was all set. This sort of freedom is only possible if you own your content and, most of all, if your online identity belongs solely to you.

The original Tumblr-based Analog Senses still exists, by the way, but it has taken on a new role. It’s now named Analog Tumbles to avoid confusion, and it acts as a companion to this site. It’s mostly an Instagram feed, but it also features those posts that have a direct relationship with the Tumblr network (posts in which another Tumblr blog is mentioned, for example, or links from Tumblr that mention Analog Senses). The fact that Tumblr is a social-network-turned-blogging-platform or vice-versa means that there are a few situations that are easier to handle from within the system, and that’s why I decided to keep it.