vanderwal.net

I didn’t realize that until Phil Gyford dropped a note from his blog tracker, ooh.directory, that my blog (this right here) turned 25 as a note in Mastodon, Phil Gyford: "@vanderwal Happy Blog Birthday…" - Mastodon. Posting has slowed down a bit from the early days, but still going. This last year the underpinnings got a good update to keep the platform running longer.

My first post was December 31, 2000 on Blogger and sent to this site by FTP. But, somewhere along the way that was lost, as is was likely a “hello squirrel” and “this is a test, I don’t know how long I will be doing this” sort of post. But, 25 years later I’m still maintaining the custom platform and adding to it, while also still posting.

In the mid 00s Twitter started eating a lot of things I would have normally posted here. The posts got longer, and more focussed, but also less frequent. Facebook and other online places also ate posts.

In June 2020 I started using Obsidian and my notes what working through ideas, which I once did on my blog were turning out in volume in Obsidian as notes. My aim was to move the link notes and longer teasing out and working through ideas into blog posts. But, that is still a work in progress.

I won’t say here’s to another 25 years as I didn’t do this for longevity I posted to share and find others who had similar interests. This is still somewhat why I still post, but the feedback loops are more odd and weird in their indirect way then they were years back.

I have been working on adding search and have a early version working in my Lab section of the site, Search Page - Lab - vanderwal.net, but it needs a about three more steps (including tweaking the database so it can handle searching for 3 letter words and not just 4 letter words and larger).