On 10/7/1994, I wrote my first blog post.
I’ve been blogging ever since.
In the first years when wifi wasn’t in every hotel room and restaurant as it is today, before cell phones or even iPods, there were weekly lapses when I went on vacation or to a massage retreat in the middle of nowhere.
Or in 2002 when I had life-saving heart surgery. I was gone for a week then. But as soon as I got home, I added a post so people knew I was okay. I understood that I was missed, and appreciated that. 😉
But other than those week-long lapses, I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged every day since. I am what you would call a Natural Born Blogger. I got the blogging bug.
We’ve done a lot on this blog, it’s hard to sum up. We created things that had lasting value. Told the truth about what the tech industry was up to, from the point of view of a Silicon Valley insider (me) who knows the language, where most journalists are intimidated. We fought the big companies and won. Podcasting was created in the community defined by this blog in the early 00s, and it remains independent to this day.
The bigs declared RSS dead, another product of this community. Wishful thinking perhaps, but things like RSS don’t die. It’s not like that. You can’t create a better format for a standard. All the competition RSS has ever received, just changed the names of things, that’s not competition, that’s being petty.
I think we’re on the verge of having new relevance, it feels that way because my secret weapon, Frontier, is running again and it will get even stronger and fit in better, now that I’ve been working primarily in JavaScript for the last 13 years. Today we’re adding Node-like packages and support for WebSockets. Last time we worked on this, neither of those existed.
I take blogging seriously, you should too. It’s very powerful, as long as we’re really working on the web. There’s a difference between having a product you can access through a browser and being on the web.
Small pieces loosely joined. All parts replaceable. Never forget that. If you can’t plug in replacements for any component, if one piece gets too large to replicate, you should hit the Back button, as Google says you should do on my blog.
Why are they trying to destroy the historic record about the web on the web itself? I have no idea. Certainly they must have had some discussion internally, or with their partner at the EFF about the cost of destroying so much history. Usually when a platform vendor is going to break you, you get invited to a private meeting where you can tell them the cost and beg them not to do it. Not with Google.
And, as they say —
Still diggin!