Say Your Name
My blog wasn't always called “Recursive Words”. It hasn't always lived at Wordpress either. Over the years I've probably written at just about every popular platform – from my own hand-written script (back before Wordpress was a glint in Matt Mullenweg's eye), through to Vox, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Blogger, Squarespace, TypePad, Posterous, Ghost, and more.
In between each migration in recent years, I've always returned to Wordpress. I'm not sure why. This post wasn't supposed to be about “where I blog” – it was supposed to be about the name. I'm an expert at following my own diversions...
I came up with the name “Recursive Words” because I wanted something original that I could grab everywhere – Twitter, Wordpress, Instagram, Tumblr, and so on. One of my long-time internet friends commented that I seemed to be building a brand – it hadn't occurred to me, but perhaps I was – if only to ring-fence the name and prevent others grabbing it at popular online destinations.
The name relates well with my day job – I'm a software and web developer – and the cyclical nature of the things I tend to write about. In programming, “recursion” is the process of feeding results back into the same function that made them – which is sort of what we do as bloggers. We read and comment on each other's blogs, and those interactions influence our future contributions. In a way, we are recursive writing machines.