Personal sites, our blogs, these were once our playgrounds. My own site was the first place I added rollover images, CSS for fonts, tried out a “table free” design. I wrote about the web, surrounded by my own experiments with the web. We all did, and it was only in reading those words from 1999 that I realised there was more to owning your own content than simply not publishing your words elsewhere.
My first blog was called Cochon d’Vol, butchered French for the Flying Pig. It was on a blogging system I built in PHP called Blog Wizard. I put a lot of work into that blogging system. Even had a logo. Never intended to release it. But it was mine. And the site went through a redesign every few months. Because that’s what we did back then.
That was a lot of work. Sites like MySpace were much easier for publishing content. And MySpace, unlike its predecessors, allowed for custom CSS to be injected by users, making each MySpace profile an experience. Usually a gaudy experience with animated backgrounds and poorly chosen colors. And then came Facebook. More refined, less targetted at children. Just publishing.
We lost sight of the importance of our own domains. Photos went up to Instagram. Every thought that came to mind went up to Twitter. But our oasis, our experimental island, was lost. Over the last year or two many of my favorite writers in web development have returned to their blogs. I have done my best to do the same. The temptation of tweeting is hard. Look at President-Elect Trump. Finding a happy medium— a pattern of what goes to those centralized networks and what goes to my own site— takes time and intentionality.
But here I can play. A refresh of this site will be coming soon, something I started working towards right after New Years. After a tumultuous 2016, I finally updated Ghost to the latest and greatest version, gaining a lot of functionality that I hadn’t had before and started planning around an updated look. Let’s return to writing refined, thoughtful articles instead of spontaneous, haphazard thoughts. Let’s return to our playgrounds.