About MidRange

I don’t know about you, but I hate when things fall off the internet. I’m not letting MidRange leave it.

Back in 2021, feeling like my creativity was pushing my writing into a flabby mess, I decided to force myself to write quickly. Each morning, I’d give myself 30 minutes. I’d write a piece, then I’d put it online. That was it. If it was good, if it was bad, so it was.

The project didn’t become famous, but it lasted a couple of years and gained a little bit of a following. But I spotted some real limitations with the format near the end, particularly as certain stories seemed to dominate the tech news.

My goal was to use this as a jumping-off point for a blog specifically about technology, but my career moved into freelance mode about a month after I shut it down, so those aspirations took a back seat. But hey, Tedium is still here.

For » The guy who wrote it:folks catching this now, here’s what this was:

» A tight deadline: I had 30 minutes to come up with something usable. If I blew the deadline, I had to tell you.

» 3X per week: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday of most weeks, I wrote this. The other two days I wrote Tedium.

» The guy who wrote it: With rare exceptions, Ernie Smith wrote nearly all of the posts here, more than 300 in total.

» A shifting format: This started out on Revue, but in the midst of the Twitter apocalypse—a major topic of the back half of MidRange’s two-year run—Revue shut down. I had to move the site to Craft CMS, where Tedium lived.

» Where it lives now: Out of a desire to simplify my footprint, MidRange is now running on Astro as a static site. That allows me to get my old Craft CMS server off the public internet once and for all. The site was converted to from its GraphQL database format to Markdown, and some of my tweets were replaced with Bluesky embeds, but it’s basically the same content, broken links and all.

» Could I bring it back someday? Anything’s possible. Something tells me a lightweight Astro site might actually make that part easier.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Enjoy MidRange’s life on the pasture.

— Ernie Smith, 05/25/2026