Blog 25.0

A Revival

I stopped blogging - I mean really, fully blogging - many years ago. It's been long enough that I can't even place the rough window of time when I stopped, or faded offline. But, while I have dabbled and written plenty on social networks since then, I've not published posts, essays, or longer works - at least, not publicly anyway. I've also written enough either for myself/privately, or for work and other reasons. Today, this changes. I want more of my works to be published; to be more publicly available. This is the first of (hopefully) many more posts to come.

I won't go too much into the reasons why I stopped publishing several times in the past for my previous blogs. But, I recently read a several-years-old (2022!) blog post from Dan Sinker that partly encapsulates at least some of my reasons for going dark in the past. Suffice it to state, I stopped writing longform works publicly in the past, and my hope now in 2025 is to re-start.

Back in the day, I happily participated within the Indie Web movement. I'd say that since back then, the activity that I've observed around Indie Web nowadays is staggering! I think when big players like WordPress enabled some neat functions, that certainly helped tons of particpants more easily wade into the ocean of fun. Other platforms and blogging tools (think: themes for static site generators like Hugo, and such) also include at least some defaults for sipping a little bit of indie web goodness. This is a great thing to see! It is so encouraging to see such high levels of engagement and use around the myriad fundamental indie web concepts. I'm not sure how deep this blog will go for enabling many of those indie web functions, since my hope is to simply write and publish more. We'll see.

Separate but maybe a little related to Indie Web, it feels like there is extra crackling energy all around for more blogs, well, indie blogs anyway. There is a new zeitgeist to blog more, and in particular to post on one's own website. I especially love the creativity and zany fun that so many indie blogs and websites are gushing out. I feel this positivity for online expression is infectious, and while my blog will be boring to look at, I'll admit this collective enthusiasm is one reason that I developed the "itch" the write again publicly.

What's With the Blog Name?

Oh, right. So, while I have had several blogs in the past, there have not been exactly 24 of them. Instead of me trying to figure out something better than "Blog 2.0", I figured I'd simply align the name of this post to this year of first publishing. I know that's not particularly clever. As can be seen by the spartan appearance of this blog, and now by this post's unimaginative title, I'm trying to avoid over-thinking things in some areas of my life.

I Guess I Got My Swagger Back; or, Managing Expectations

Ok, just to manage whatever expectations there might be around this blog, it will most certainly be rambly, be full of run-on-sentences, hell, even contain plenty of run-on-thoughts, and likely infrequently updated. I won't be vying for any Nobel prizes nor Peabody awards, I can assure you of that. But, more than anything, my future posts will include galactic levels of nonsense! In fact, roughly half of the reason for this blog - besides simply writing and publishing more online - is not for a hopeful audience, but rather, notes for me to save and have handy. Think of it as a sort of self documentation site on tech topics (usable nginx configs for multiple websites on the same host, simple bash concepts, that rsync comand that i always seem to forget how to craft, etc.) that could seem like nonsense, but may help me. In other words, this blog revival is in big part for me, and not only the audience. Nevertheless, I invite you to enjoy this blog!