Twenty-one years ago today, I posted for the first time on this blog. A lot has happened: My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last year; we have two nearly adult children; I’ve moved twice; changed jobs a few times; traveled quite a bit, and seen much joy and heartache.
In terms of this site, it started out built on my own homegrown CMS based on ColdFusion, then moved to WordPress in 2006, where it’s been ever since.
I’ve redesigned roughly 4-5 times (multiple times using my own custom themes and several with commercial themes), written over 590 posts, and tried some things I thought were pretty fun at the time but never carried through (what would a blog be if it didn’t have several false starts?)
I don’t post nearly as much as I used to, though I love keeping the blog going with occasional updates and tinkering on the technology behind the scenes.
During the past two plus decades, I’m fairly surprised at how little has changed with the web: the tool I use to publish this site is largely unchanged other than iterative improvements; the web itself is structurally quite similar, other than an increasing expansion of social media. That’s also paralleled by a fairly dramatic yet predictable shift from the web towards a corporate-controlled landscape with limited bottom-up, grassroots innovation, because that “user generated” creativity and innovation now comes almost exclusively from social media trends. The downside is that those trends, while culturally influential, are limited simply by the fact that users are working within small context of other platforms rather than their own. I get why – it’s easier, and it’s where the audience is – but an audience will always follow the most interesting content. In the next 21 years I’d love to see the web move back towards one where the most innovation and entertainment is originating from people with seemingly crazy ideas that make something new and have fun doing it.
