Let Sleeping Blogs Die (or) The Return of the Personal Website
I started a blog in February 2004, and for the next 5ish years I posted something to the web so often I called it the Very Daily Weblog.
This was B.S.M. — Before Social Media. Pre-Don’t Read the Comments. It was also before I learned to write, or that every thought going through my head didn’t need to be published on the internet. (I would not encourage you to dig around the archives before 2009. There be dragons.)
By some chance of early web — which felt impossibly small and connected — my blog became a pretty chill little community and a gateway to the WWW for a bunch of nice folks who showed up to see what I’d found out in the wastelands everyday. Civil discourse happened. I made friends. Some of you might be reading this post (hi, dotcomrades!) But over time my output slowed. New jobs. New cities. Twitter ate blogging. I met a girl. Work got busy. Stupid adulting.
I posted maybe twice a week in 2010. About once a week in 2011. I started writing longform essays instead of sharing links. I think I posted 12 times in 2012 and 12 times in 2013. Truth be told, blogging well is hard work, just like doing anything else well.
For the last 5ish years I haven’t touched this site1. It gave the haggard WordPress database long enough to get proper hacked by Pharma Spammers a few times. And it gave me long enough to become a different person, with different things to say, and a hard-fought desire to use whatever meager platform I have to point people toward other voices, too.
I don’t know much, but I know I love you I know I miss 2004 web, personal websites, and curation that has nothing to do with algorithms. And maybe you do, too. So here we are, dusting off the URL, like a baby Blankenphoenix rising from the ashes of 27,000 deleted Viagra comments.
Happy 15th anniversary, Blog. The traditional 15th year gift is crystal, but I got you some new CSS that hasn’t been tested in enough places yet. Done is better than perfect.
Onward and upward, friends.
Footnotes
1. In the interest of an accurate archive, I’ve gone back and added a handful of articles from 2015–2018 that were previously published elsewhere (Medium, etc.).