20.667 Years of (Sporadic) Blogging

The above title is mostly truthful if you’ll excuse the small matters of that blogging being across more than one domain name, and most of that content now only available via the Wayback Machine. I know this because I went in and searched yesterday. I’ve pondered whether or not to pull out that older content and put it back on this site, but, if I’m absolutely honest, most of what I wrote back then wasn’t great. My only consistency over two decades has been a propensity for puns whenever I can think of one and wherever I can sneak one in.

I rapidly cycled through several blogging systems in the first year or so — Blogger, RadioUserland(?), MovableType and finally WordPress. I briefly tried out SquareSpace around 2009-10 but that just didn’t gel with me. And I’ve blogged through and hosted with Micro.blog a couple of times as well. I don’t quite have Jack Baty Syndrome (hi Jack if you’re reading this 👋), I’m not that antsy around my workflow.🤪

The sporadic part is totally the fault of social media, which soaked up a lot of my online discourse. I did keep a few things that I wrote to go onto Tumblr in the 2010, and honestly those are pretty decent today. But the stuff I posted 20 years ago… not so much.

I’m currently working out what I want to do next with this site. For all that I like about WordPress, I’m approaching the limit of what I can do without delving into custom theming and adding code on the back-end, and I’m not sure if the effort is going to be worth it.

As an exercise, I started writing a simple static website this past week, just in HTML, something I’ve not done in a long time, and remembering how much fun that can be! (Those were primarily front-ends for CD and DVD information packs, and reflected the technology of the times in so many ways.) I could see myself turning into an artisanal website builder, though it would be a big undertaking to convert the whole of this site, so perhaps I should find a middle ground option that gives me some automation but lets me fine-tune the output.