Hello World (Again)
It seems only natural that a blog should begin with a post called 'Hello World'. This isn't really a beginning at all though – it's the result of an endless trudge around the internet looking for a suitable place to publish all manner of forgettable rubbish.
This is where I admit to having somewhere in the region of four and a half thousand posts quietly stored away, written over the last 16 years. A veritable Aladdin's cave filled with posts about the inconsequential and mundane experiences of every day life that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. If you happen to find yourself reading this post on the evening of the 19th January 2019, somewhere deep in a server farm somewhere, a database cluster is having a bit of a nightmare as millions of words come tumbling towards it – an avalanche of apathy, procrastination, and idiocy. If you happen upon this page in the days afterwards, you will discover an endless stream of posts that should you print out, would probably waste an awful lot of printer paper and ink.
You see – I've been writing a blog since the beginning.
Oh dear – that makes me sound like some kind of Old Testament Methuselah type character.
I have though – been writing since the beginning. I started writing posts before 'blogging' became a thing, and once upon a time wrote my own blogging script, and released it as open source. I was somewhat famous for a few minutes. Thankfully a nice chap called Matt Mullenweg appeared, and Wordpress happened – meaning I could ditch my code and use his. Along the way I also played with LiveJournal, Vox, Blogger, TypePad, Yahoo 360, MySpace, and all the other platforms that rose and fell.
These days I sit on an imaginary fence, high above the internet – watching, reading, smiling, frowning – and trying not to react to the hoards of trolls that crawl from their holes from time to time spouting political hyperbole and inflammatory idiocy. Instead of engaging, I quietly write my words, and publish them into quiet corners of the internet without telling anybody. This sounds a bit mad in these times of self promotion and marketing mania, but I tend to think there is something tremendously serendipitous about discovering things while not looking for them.
Is this a mission? I suppose you might say it is. I never set out to tell the story of my life, but I appear to be doing so – one post at a time.