Today is the twentieth anniversary of my oldest existing blog post (amusingly, it is about how Linux on my laptop wasn’t working out for me). I state it in that specific way because I lost my original run of posts that were on a super-old CMS. I didn’t think to import them when I first switched to Wordpress. I am sure it was not many posts—ten or twenty at the most, probably.
I didn’t even have a domain name at the time, so the URL was just whatever static IP (remember those?) that my ISP had given me. The blog ran on my home PC and continued that way for years. I don’t think I bought my first domain until 2006 or 2007; even then, I continued to run the blog from home, pointing the A record and the CNAME to my home IP.
My original run on Wordpress began in 2003, and I stayed with that as my CMS for a few years. When I moved to a static site generator in the late 2000s, I imported all of my old Wordpress posts to that site. Then I started using Wordpress again in 2018 with Micro.blog, but did not import my old posts. I have left the old site running instead. Now that I have moved fully to Micro.blog, I need to figure out how to get the old static site imported here.
I continue to post on this blog fairly regularly—a few times a week at least. Most of the posts are very short, usually only a few sentences and sometimes just one sentence. Many do not have a title, a habit I picked up from posting on Twitter and Facebook. When I stopped posting to those services, I mostly just used my own site for the same kind of thing.
I do not spend much time thinking about my blog these days—what it is for, who is reading it, whether my audience is growing—and I really like that. It is just my place on the internet for me to say stuff. Honestly, I could not even say why I keep up the practice at this point, other than that it is a thing that I do and it is easy enough, so why stop?
As I have written before, though, I have grown fairly ambivalent about the value of writing online. I hate the idea of “content”—stuff you create not primarily for its own merits, but for attracting and keeping readers or viewers—because you can never be sure that it is honest and true. As for creative writing and thinking, I am not sure anyone is well served by exposing themselves and their creative processes to the acid bath of the public internet.
So why keep posting to my blog? I really am not sure, but I keep doing it anyway, and that seems okay for now.