Hello World
Starting a new blog or website places a certain amount of pressure on the author to provide some kind of spectacularly worthy, interesting, or thought provoking content for the first visitors to read, in the hopes that they might be enthused enough to return in the future.
Perhaps if we suggest that this post is an acorn that might one day grown into a mighty oak tree, we neatly avoid any such expectations.
You could say my arrival back at WordPress is the latest chapter in a story that started over a decade agowhen I published a few journal entries onto some webspace, and a co-worker convinced me to release the lashed-together code as “open source” software (I had no idea what “open source” meant at the time).
Before long the likes of Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress appeared, and my interest had turned to writing, more than accidentally designing, developing and maintaining a blogging platform that thousands of people all over the world had ended up using.
Over the years that followed my “retirement” from the roles of accidental platform architect, and minor open source celebrity, I went on something of a journey through the popular blogging platforms as they came and wentVox, WordPress, TypePad, WordPress again, Blogger, Yahoo 360, WordPress yet again, and so on. I always returned to WordPressrecording the story of my day, and sharing it with the world and it's dog. Occasionally I got into trouble for sharing too much, or expressing an unwise opinion, but by and large my words existed in a (very) quiet corner of the internet that was almost entirely ignored. This was a good thing.
I guess over the last couple of years, I have been coasting. Playing with code again (I built a prototype social network called “We The Users” that used markdown in much the same was as Ghost), and sometimes kicking myself into writing the story of daily happenings. I have been a “flake”.
For the last few months I have played with “Ghost”, and sat out on my own little islandmy own “splendid isolation”. I haven't posted often, and often wondered about shuttering the blog entirelybut something draws me back as it always has done. I'm wondering if it's really the interactions with others that I'm looking for, rather than the story telling. Throughout the last few years I have maintained a Tumblr blog, and despite the many and various flaws of the platform, I have continued onbecause the community of strangers I have come to know make the platform better than the sum of it's parts.
I didn't set out for this to become yet another post about blogging platforms and communities, but it seems to have done. Introverted navel gazing of the highest order. Pulitzer Prize winning dross. Enough.
Here I am.
Just a boy, standing in front of the internet, asking passers by to ignore pretty much everything he says, but maybe read some of his words now and again and not get too annoyed with them.