Obtvse, if not Svbtle

I discovered Svbtle via Obtvse, which is backwards, but I'll get to that. Lead by Dustin Curtis:

Svbtle is designed from a philosophy that focuses first and foremost on writing and the curation of ideas, and not on social features or personalization

Currently, Svbtle is limited to a very short list of vetted writers and aspires to become a place for well-written, well-edited, minimalist blogs. Their early lineup may be interesting if you're a lot like me (a web tech, probably male, with an interest in web culture, design and entrepreneurship). Predictable homogeneity aside, I appreciate the spirit of this effort to raise the bar on quality of writing and curation and to strip away the clutter for a more thoughtful, considerate reading & writing experience.

Lately, I've been feeling unsatisfied with the constraints and incentives of the online "social" ecosystems with which I participate. I miss the the honest-to-goodness article sharing of Google Reader's amputated "social" features. I like the experience of sharing a link on Facebook, but feel like I'm often imposing on different, non-overlapping audiences. I want to spend less time immersed in the cacophonies of Twitter & Facebook. I want a place to share a thought longer than 3 sentences.

Today AH posted that she might give up on her blog. I gave up on my own, much less interesting endeavor, long ago. But I think it is time to try again.

I'm not interested in further contributions to existing attention machines, but I hate having to be a part-time sysadmin just to keep my blog running. Obtvse, inspired by Svbtle and designed to be easily deployed on Heroku, balances this problem neatly. Heroku takes care of low-level systems drudgery and makes code deployment easy. As a relatively simple, open-source Rails app, I am right at home managing the code. This is definitely not for everybody, but a nice fit for me.