I remember once upon a time I’d discover a new blog and spend hours going backwards through time to try to reach the first post. It felt practically necessary - the only way context could be sufficiently established, that you could follow along with new developments. In the days before RSS - that is, only 5 years ago - you’d click through your list of links daily, just to discover if they’d posted something new. ...
When did this place become a ‘blog’ instead of a ‘homepage’? Or was it ever a ‘homepage’? I remember back in the day (10 whole years ago!), people didn’t have ‘blogs’, they had ‘home pages’. It was different for one reason: a blog you’re expected to update, and is supposed to be for people to look in. A home page, on the other hand, didn’t need to update for months on end (but that didn’t stop you from checking back every day if it was a really good home page). ...
Going on the point I made just before, I went back and looked at what I had written oh so long ago, back when this used to be the dke project, all the way back on friendlygrocer :) The first thing I picked up on was that my designs overall have probably been slipping :) Back then, each page, each post was carefully crafted by hand, for without script-enabled hosting, what other method is there? And the other thing was that it wasn’t just a blog, it was a whole personal site, and that’s something that going down the blogging platform path takes away from you, I think. It does make a lot of other things a helluva lot easier (no need to FTP in every update, for one). ...
So I suggest an article to Kottke, and he even puts it up with credit to me (rather than defective yeti, from where i got it), and I just think: “crap, I forgot to give my address!” pardon the web-geekery =)
Name a topic and I’ll write 500 words of my opinion on it. On the value of the fiction novel and what it indicates about humankind. Storytelling was once a great oral tradition, the most widely used method of passing on culture, religion, tradition and knowledge. Paper and writing systems have been around since ancient times as well, but the oral tradition of storytelling remained dominant until the industrial age and the spread of the printing press. However, while this declined, the modern, written storytelling came into being, in the form of the novel, such as those written by one of the most famous names in the business, Charles Dickens. ...