A new blogging paradigm?
According to Wikipedia the first web sites that were used for diary purposes started popping up in 1994. They were so few and far between that the consensus is that you could still be thought of as an early adopter if you had one before the end of 1997. I had a web site by early 1996 but I’m not sure I beat that deadline on the ‘diary’ or ‘online journal’ aspect. But I did eventually roll my own which I called “The Daily Rant” and which I created from scratch using a paid hosting account and Active Server Pages and a MS Access database, probably in 1998 or 1999.
I’ve gone through many hosting accounts and too many blog package installations to remember since then. For the last few years I’ve been a big fan of WordPress, but even that started becoming more of a problem than a solution, especially when I ended up with five separate domain names and sites. Every time I upgraded just to be hit with an ‘urgent’ security update the next week just killed me. I began spending more time on upgrades, plugins and tweaks than I did on content. Earlier this year I faced reality and consolidated all of my sites down to just two. Now I have transitioned my one remaining personal blog here to Tumblr. I think Tumblr has done a lot of things right, and their focus is on making the uploading and display of your content as quick and seamless as possible.
So far I’m enjoying actually putting up content again, on a fairly regular basis! My string of posts is far from unbroken, but it feels good to have articles stretching back to 1998 all here on one site.
Holy Shit! It just hit me, that in three months I will have web posts here on this site spanning TEN FUCKING YEARS! I’m not sure how that makes me feel. I may have to sleep on that one.