I was invited to do a “website tour”, to basically give a history of the structure and technology behind this site, for Hyperlink Academy. I thought it went pretty well, although I couldn’t stand to re-listen (I didn’t re-watch) to it for a while. When I did, I realized the host’s background noise during the first third or so of the talk is really distracting. I created a version that crops off that first third.
If you want to watch the entire thing, use this YouTube link.
Here’s the outline I worked from:
History
- 2001: Blogger
dealingwith.blogspot.com
nonlinear.blogspot.com
- 2002: “SWIM”
- danielsjourney.com
- “SWiM test 1M”
- this awesome permalink style
www.danielsjourney.com/index.php?archive=2002_10_01_archive.xml&id_pass=82418226
- 2003: “The peak”
- Was funemployed and childless and moving to Europe and writing a lot both on the site and elsewhere
- ~1-2k daily visitors
- after 2004 I pretty much stopped worrying about analytics
- Pre-Twitter, it really was “web logging” – everything went on the blog
- 200?
- LiveJournal
- 2010: Jekyll
2010.danielsjourney.com
- 2011
- back to danielsjourney.com
- Desire, Meaning, Beauty, Stories (The Last Post)
- sometimes at:
/blog
(maybe?)blog.
- the root
- back to danielsjourney.com
- 201?
- integrate all the things
- 2010 posts
- old LiveJournal posts
- move to just danielsjourney.com
- integrate all the things
- 2019
- daniel.industries
- 2020
poseur.daniel.industries- zola
Process
- High level
- Private notes and journaling
- notes app
- have tried them all, most used was Dendron (RIP) and now Logseq
- used to be just a folder with .md files with a ruby script for generating from a template
- a long time ago I had a private MoveableType blog
- notes app
- Semi-public
- 200 words a day
- then adagia.org
- now, nothing
- Public
- blog
- The private and semi-private stuff will probably get lost, or at best is much less searchable and fungible.
- the public blog is the archive
- as such, a lot of private or semi-public stuff might get imported over time
- less concern for how polished the work is when it’s going into the archive
- Private notes and journaling
- Some of the nuts and bolts
- still have a rake file left over from Octopress with various tasks I still use today
new_post
isolate
gen_deploy
- randomjourney script that spits out a new random post from the past for me to garden – I do this rather infrequently
- still have a rake file left over from Octopress with various tasks I still use today
Lessons
- The #1 benefit of maintaining your own blog for 19.5 years is for your own personal benefit
- not for professional benefit or your personal “brand”
- for your personal history:
- remembering
- learning about yourself
- nostalgia
- Host yourself
- Requires the tiniest bit of tech savvy
- Over a long enough time scale, blog hosts come and go
- Avoid databases if at all possible
- flat files are awesome
- searchable from a text editor
- mass edits from a text editor
- require a little bit of dev savvy
- lots of regex find/replace
- site generators that use flat files usually require some dev env and coding
- flat files are awesome
- Avoid dependencies
- not just hosts and databases – all tooling
- daniel.industries is 3 gems (including jekyll)
- getzola.org is a single rust app
- Permalinks, permalinks, permalinks!
- Err on the side of posting
- drafts get lost
- personal note systems change
- nobody really cares
- cool people might email you about a post from 19 years ago
- Don’t feel bad for:
- constantly redesigning
- constantly fiddling with your tools or process
- revising history