Caveat: I started my stupid blog 20 years ago today

My personal blog turns 20 years old today. Which is to say, 20 years ago, on this day, at this hour, I posted this: Caveat: Dumptruck.

The first few years were a bit sporadic. There was a whole elapsed year during which I failed to post to it at all.

But when I moved to South Korea for my first teaching job in September, 2007, I made a commitment to myself that I’d try to post at least once daily, and I’ve kept that commitment since then, without fail (as far as I can remember or figure out).

I’ve gone through some long periods, even years long, where I consistently posted twice daily. Other times, I’ve slacked off. I’ve even had a few stretches of a month or two where I was consistently posting three times a day. I’ve journaled the minutiae of some quite intense life experiences here – perhaps most notably, my battle with cancer in the summer and fall of 2013. I’m also proud of the way that I managed to blog a 10-day stay at a meditation retreat in December, 2009, despite the fact that phones and computers and internet and note-taking were banned. I did it by compiling the entries in my mind, a kind of temporary memory palace, and then writing it all down once I returned “to civilization,” back-dating the entries.

This blog has had some fairly dry spells, too, in terms of stimulating content. But there’s always been something. I’ve had a lot of luck with a few “daily features.” Since 2016, I’ve had my daily poems. And for my first 5 1/2 years here in Alaska, I was posting my daily tree pictures. Really, those enumerated trees were just pretexts to keep myself posting. More than anything else, this blog has become my own “aide-memoire“: a kind of public-facing version of the type of journals (diaries) that I had maintained with quite a bit of consistency throughout my life, since my teen years. In that sense, this blog’s primary target audience has become my own future self.

One probably unusual feature of my blog, compared to other personal blogs, is that I’ve made at least a small effort to “back-post” some entries to epochs prior to its founding, using the backdating feature of the blog-hosting software. So I have entries in the blog going back to the date of my birth, in 1965. I dubbed this effort “retroblogging.” These entries are either retrospective observations of my life at a given epoch, or else transcriptions from those once-upon-a-time paper journals. I still harbor ambitions to post a great deal more of this material, but it’s hard to find the motivation to do so, and there are many other important blog-maintenance tasks that end up taking higher priority. “Link rot” (that internet phenomenon where old links to websites, videos, etc., tend to stop working over time) is harsh taskmaster when you have more than 10,000 blog entries to maintain.

One seemingly never-ending blog-maintenance task provides a good illustration: I am STILL struggling (after nearly 6 years of self-hosting, now) with transitioning my 1000’s of pictures off my old, subscription-based blog-hosting software (typepad). So… I’m still paying that old blog-host’s annual fee. Even as I write this, I have “September, 2012” open in my browser, where I plod along, grabbing photos and images from the old site and transferring them over to my own self-hosted server, and manually editing each link, in turn.

Here’s something notable: this blog is older than facebook, as we know it. Zuck’s facebook existed as “thefacebook.com”, a social network limited to only college students, in 2004, but it didn’t become a worldwide phenomenon open to the general public until at least one or two years later. My blog is only one year younger than Tyler Cowen’s MarginalRevolution, one of the longest-running blogs on the internet – and which I have read on and off continuously since that era. Not that I’m comparing myself to Tyler Cowen – he’s a public intellectual with hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers.

My blog maxed out at about five regular readers, in the mid 2010’s, but is now back down to a much-more-manageable one or two regular readers. That’s definitely a comfortable and sustainable level of engagement.

In the celebratory spirit, I’ll break my facebook embargo and post this entry, in toto, to that platform. *waves hello to facebookland*

I enjoy getting those spam emails from website search optimization consultants: “we can improve your reader engagement!” I receive several every day. I want to write back, simply, “oh rly?”

It’s not worth the bother, though. Hope you’ve had an interesting 20 years. I have.