December 2, 2022
It's still kind of weird to be writing here again, and I've been thinking a bit about how much this has changed since I started blogging back in 2001.
This was two years before Wordpress, and five years before Twitter. Livejournal was still relatively new. Most blogging I knew of was on individual servers, either as hand-coded files (like this one started out when it was on Geocities) or as hand-coded database-driven sites (like this has been from the days at Pair up until now).
One site I visited frequently back then was Spinnwebe, which ain't what it used to be. Aside from the DFC, Spinn started his own weblog called "Brain Shots" that he updated on a mostly-daily basis.
That blog was what inspired me to give all this -- coding up the site, making a terribly-built database, and then actually writing things -- a try. The blog name is something of a riff on his, and the concept of timed releases for posts instead of putting them online instantly came from him, too. There's only one other blog I know of that works that way.
I also stole the idea for what I'm pretty sure is the most commonly-used theme here: A picture with a short caption, titled [Number] to go. With Spinn it was always three words, so the title was always "997 to go". I'm not that clever so the number changes a bit for me. The one constant is that a picture is worth a thousand words.
One thing that I don't think I borrowed from Spinn was having comments. He decided at the beginning that his site was only going to have his writing on it, and looking back I think he made the right call. I liked the Livejournal-y back and forth, but it didn't take long for the bots and spammers to find it so I deleted that part of the site. I suppose I could figure out how to install Disqus or something, but I think I'd rather just keep shouting into the darkness at this point.
And of course there's always the short-form idiocy on Twitter.
But yeah, this feels kind of retro nowadays. Sure, blogging never went away, but something about sites like Medium or Substack just feel different in a way I can't put my finger on. Not like my dumb little online diary that's now old enough to drink.
