I somehow missed the actual 20th Anniversary of the Blog back in April and finally noticed last week. This could be a massive post with links to highlights and lowlights over the past twenty years but I think I’d prefer to keep it short.
After using Frontpage in the 90s and hosting a “homepage” on Indigo, Geocities and others, I made the move to Blogger on April 17th 2001. That was followed by the golden years of blogging from 2006-2010 on WordPress and eventually the move via various static site generators to Hugo a few years back.
My output ranged from multiple posts per day to sometimes only one post in a year, but I never lost the bug. Even when I wasn’t blogging I’d be thinking “that’d make a great blogpost”. But in recent years it usually became a throwaway Tweet that disappeared into the ether, never to be read again (or even the first time).
And that’s why I’ll keep plugging away here as people’s communications fashions come and go. There is something important in the history of people’s activity on the internet having longevity. I’ve ranted about Yahoo’s cultural terrorism in the past and I’m even more concerned that everything that happens on Social and Private Messaging could disappear forever at the whim of a tech-bro.
It’s why The Wayback Machine is so important. And why we need something like it and like GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault for all of those conversations that deserve archival. If an asteroid wipes us out, will future entities think that we stopped communicating with each other in 2007?
Whilst a lot of what I posted here over twenty years was rubbish, there have been some posts that people have found useful or valuable. Year in, year out, Google Analytics tells me the same small set of useful/non-opinion posts get most of the traffic here and on my tech blog. I want to write more like that over the next twenty years.
I might even write another award winning post when blogging become cool again, around the same time as skinny jeans.
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