Fogi kindly mailed me 2 days ago with a link to the oldest post on this blog, reminding me that today is my Blog Mitzva: 13 years since I started posting stuff to the internet using a blog-type thing.
Reviewing the old posts tracks my convoluted route through assorted obscure publishing technologies, starting with Dave Winer‘s early public blogging platform (Edit This Page dot com, which couldn’t take the traffic even way back then, moving to blogger (hosted editing, but the results uploaded to my own site on corky.net via FTP), then back to a Dave Winer product, Radio (a local application for editing and uploading via FTP to my site). Once Radio moved to a paid model and I could no longer downgrade back to the free version, I installed Movable Type, a Perl CGI application that let you edit posts in the browser on your own server, storing them in a Berkley DB file, and “rendering” them to HTML files for presentation. This complicated setup got replaced by WordPress once PHP came to corky and too over web applications in general. And here I am today.
Reviewing the content accumulated in my blog over the years gives a somewhat sad picture. No essays or extended arguments, no fiction or poems, no reviews or technical articles. There was never much effort put into any of the posts, most of them are just odd links with a few words to pad around them, trivial notes, fragmentary documentation of my delinquent browsing, fiddling with software, percolating ideas for roleplaying games and general faffing about. Slim scriblets that fairly drown in the ostentatious blog adornments WordPress slathers on each (title! categories! tags!), like almond slivers sinking in rich cream. And even these bits, barely tweets are scattered over time, just 1,791 items posted over 4,745 days. Mostly, it’s just silence.
In short, a pretty accurate picture of my life.
