Porcelain

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play…

No. Wait. That’s not right; let me start again.

My very first post to this “weblog” (as the term still was then) was exactly twenty years ago. The colophon has some of the story of how the implementation has changed over the years, but today I thought it would be more interesting to look and see what if anything I have learned from two decades writing here. There are not many things in your life you end up devoting effort to over that span of time, after all.

Some statistics, just for fun: there are 260 posts here excluding this one but including the iay@there side-blog I ran for a few months in 2004¹. That’s an average of a bit over one post a month, but you can see from the Archives page that my output has been rather uneven: I’m not at all sure what happened to silence me in 2015–2016, as most people would claim it’s usually pretty difficult to get me to shut up.

Looking at the posts on the main blog by tag, I wasn’t surprised to find that the biggest cluster of subjects has been around digital identity, cryptography, and security more generally. That’s been my principal line of work for most of this time, after all.

If you include both blogs, though, “virtual reality” actually wins out. That might be a little surprising unless you’re aware of my brief career as a professional construction worker in the Second Life virtuality.

Over the years several communities have, I believe, found this blog useful. The most surprising to me, certainly at the time, was the result of the spectacular success of a pair of articles I wrote in 2003 about my experiments with 8-bit microcontrollers. They were so popular — presumably because they were just in the right place at the right time — that the advertisements I ran on PIC16C745/765: microcontrollers with USB and My Very First USB Peripheral were enough to pay my hosting fees for that year, which was nice. They are are the only pages I’ve ever run advertisements on, and I no longer serve up anything I’d need to host a cookie banner for, not even analytics.

In the early days, before the scourge of spam inevitably spread to the world of blogs, this one had both trackback and comment functionality. Equally inevitably, I gave up what would otherwise have become a full-time moderation job here so that I could devote time to my paid work. There are some crackers in there if you root around; they’re still visible because I imported everything from the database-backed versions of the blog when I Nanoced it into a static site. My favourite, I think, is the one where a commenter asks if he can buy my cuddly headcrab. I was not able to oblige him, alas.

So, twenty years. Has it been worth it? Yes, absolutely. I enjoy writing long form, and working with words in general. I do get to write from time to time for my paying work, and that’s enjoyable as an exercise of vital powers but it’s not really the same as self-directed writing.

So, writing has been worth it, but what about writing here, at iay.org.uk? Has the palaver of hosting my own site, learning Movable Type, Drupal, Nanoc, all that stuff… has that paid off? One of my answers should be obvious if you’ve glanced at the site title: as well as sometimes being a pain, digging into the technology has also been fun. So again, yes.

I’ll finish with a second and more serious answer to the same question, which I will shamelessly steal from John Scalzi (who has been blogging at Whatever for twenty-four years as I write this):

I’ve had Scalzi.com since March of 1998, which has been enough time for at least four generations of online social networking sites. They come and go; my site remains. And it will remain when the hip kids roll their eyes at whatever pathetic dinosaurs still remain on Facebook (hint: that’s already happening). Online, that’s as good as permanence gets.

Scalzi wrote this in 2011: long before the recent unpleasantness on Twitter, back in the early days when Twitter was becoming the New Hotness people were talking about. We may not be at the sad end of that particular mayfly’s lifecycle just yet, but who would start using it right now?

None of us are here for the long term, but I think it’s wise to treat all online services — other people’s computers — as entirely ephemeral. Whether a service survives for more than a handful of years is out of my control, and the last year has certainly demonstrated that what motivates the owners of such services does not necessarily align with what would be best for me.

Fortunately, many of the things I love about social media (the wellspring of ideas, the active conversation and, honestly, the cat pictures) don’t require persistence. They require active interest; they require being the thing that people think is the New Hotness. Until we all move on to the new place we’re all hearing about.