There’s a question that gets asked in every People & Blogs interview:
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
Let’s see. Since I started writing online in 1997, before the word “blog” was even a thing, I think the one thing I may do differently is a throwback to something I once did do but abandoned over time: I’d create a single page where all my writing lives in one spot.
Individual posts weren’t the default once upon a time. It was all about the page. Specifically: the individual page known as a log.
Maybe that idea’s a bit out there for some. Many possibly. But it’d be set up similar to how my random thoughts page is now. A brain dump. Everything inside. Short essays. Long essays. Eh, random thoughts. Personal musings. Anything and everything.
It’d take years to get to the end. You’d have to write down a couple of words or a phrase in a notepad. Then when you jumped back on the next day to continue reading, you’d hit Ctrl (or Command) + F to find the phrase and dig back in.
Picture an old fashioned scroll on papyrus instead of a book you flip through. Kinda like that. But digitally.
No individual blog posts. No individualized URLs to share. Maybe I’d create anchor links for that sort of thing. I don’t know. Either way, it’d kind of be a pain in the ass to make a post go viral because there’d be no true, one post. That’d be great. Virality is kinda lame and made blogging turn into clickbait over time.
It’d be a true log like the one I once had on my first website RIP. Pour one out.
I think the easiest answer to this question would be me saying that I’d register a single domain name and have kept it the same all those years instead of jumping around for fifteen years. Or maybe I wouldn’t use my actual name at all. I mean, the first few years I had to contend with “Jeffrey Dahmer Pillows” in the search results for people to even find my blog and I don’t think I necessarily want people who search for “Jeffrey Dahmer Pillows” to find their way to my blog.
No. No, I do not. Sure, hindsight on a consistent domain name is 20/20. So maybe that answer is a little too common. Little too easy.
Another, also common, is to answer with something like, “I’d choose one platform and stick with it.” Or, I’d never go with WordPress because Matt M has turned into a [censored]. He wasn’t always. Who was I to know? Or I’d maybe answer that I’d roll with one way of getting my words online and stick with that. Something.
But that’d be a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet once was. The technology that existed then vs. now. HTML is HTML. No biggie. I used to hand-code everything I wrote before uploading to a server. CSS was in its infancy. There was no support for CSS until what, December 1996. Even that was minimal. The other coding languages…
If you started blogging post-2008, you may not realize what was and wasn’t an option back in the 90s. Not a lot. Ever tried to send a text on a rotary telephone? Kinda like that. And, after all, even if you found something lovely that you thought would stick around a while, do you realize how many of those platforms, servers, services, etc etc etc died in 2000 when the dot com boom went dot kapow?
I’m sticking with my original answer as to what would I do differently if I were starting a blog now: the brain dump page where everything lives. I think the fragmented thoughts of it all would be interesting and almost a psychological experience in and unto itself.
So, if I’m ever asked do the People & Blogs series, that’s what I’m rolling with. Because starting a blog anew? How about we get back to logs, man.
Signed,
One of the OG bloggers who was so dedicated to logging (not blogging) at 15 years old I used dial-up Internet to make it happen. If you’ve never experienced the painstakingly slow crunch and churn and brrrrpp brrrckk of dial-up Internet, consider yourself lucky. Shout out to my parents for letting me tie up the phone line every day back then.
You the real MVP.
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