20-Up

This blog is now 20 years old. Which is somewhat terrifying. Not only is this two decades of uninterrupted blogging, somehow managing to muddle through when so many vast titans of the blog craze have fallen by the wayside, but it’s also the same amount of time since I went to UNC for my ill-fated attempt at a doctorate. Yet it was a part in a chain of events that started with me taking a card off the third year noticeboard in the Kilburn Building and ending up here in Cincinnati. And the blog has been a haphazard chronicle of that.

Ideally, I would have gone back through the archives to give you a list of my favourite pieces¹, but I absolutely hate going through my older work so…no. I will say that I think one of my regrets is that I didn’t really post a lot during my time in California from 2011-2012. I know that there were multiple reasons for that: I was somewhat downcast at being stranded in Santa Monica for months and months; I was worried about the NDA issues surrounding talking about my work with Activision at the time…but it wasn’t like I was doing a lot during the evenings, and while I did try to get out and about in the surrounding areas at the weekends, I should have added more entries while I was trapped². These days, I’m pretty good at adding an entry once a week, even if it ends up being little more than an Instagram embed, and I think that’s a decent cadence for the time being.

I’ve also been thinking about the technology behind the blog a little. Over the past 20 years, the blog has been powered by:

• A home-grown system written in Perl, based on Slashcode designs — this didn’t last more than a day, thankfully
• Movable Type — I stayed on this after I think everybody on the internet had moved to WordPress
• Jekyll — I don’t think I ever did make the jump to WordPress; I just moved onto the crazy hotness of static-site generators instead. It was good, but eventually, the long list of files that had to be regenerated each time led me to:
• Hugo — Hugo has been powering the blog for a fair few years now; it just does what it does in a few seconds and then I just rsync all my files to the web. I should really update things so I don’t have to be at my laptop to post new entries, but otherwise it’s a pretty good setup these days.

There’s also been quite few different designs and sideblogs. There was a photography sideblog, a different blog which ran longer pieces on obscure Britpop songs that literally only existed so I could try and become a music journalist³, Twitter embeds, Disqus for comments for quite a long time, a custom XML-RPC Python blogging app I wrote that added what music I was playing automatically to the post, and probably a bunch of other things that I’ve forgotten. When I moved to Hugo, I ditched all my custom CSS designs and just used the Hyde theme which you see today. I am tired of it, but I don’t see myself sitting down and fixing up something new in the immediate future. I think if I switch out the body font from Open Sans to something else, it might be a little more appealing to me again.

Anyway, yes, twenty years! The domain is renewed through 2030, so hopefully I’ll continue to be here at least until then…and who knows what new things there will be to talk about in the future?