Website Tour

I was invited to do a “website tour”, to basically give a history of the structure and technology behind this site, for Hyperlink Academy. I thought it went pretty well, although I couldn’t stand to re-listen (I didn’t re-watch) to it for a while. When I did, I realized the host’s background noise during the first third or so of the talk is really distracting. I created a version that crops off that first third.

If you want to watch the entire thing, use this YouTube link.

Here’s the outline I worked from:

History

• 2001: Blogger
  • dealingwith.blogspot.com
  • nonlinear.blogspot.com
• 2002: “SWIM”
  • danielsjourney.com
  • “SWiM test 1M”
  • this awesome permalink style
    • www.danielsjourney.com/index.php?archive=2002_10_01_archive.xml&id_pass=82418226
• 2003: “The peak”
  • Was funemployed and childless and moving to Europe and writing a lot both on the site and elsewhere
  • ~1-2k daily visitors
  • after 2004 I pretty much stopped worrying about analytics
  • Pre-Twitter, it really was “web logging” – everything went on the blog
• 200?
  • LiveJournal
• 2010: Jekyll
  • 2010.danielsjourney.com
• 2011
  • back to danielsjourney.com
    • Desire, Meaning, Beauty, Stories (The Last Post)
    • sometimes at:
      • /blog (maybe?)
      • blog.
      • the root
• 201?
  • integrate all the things
    • 2010 posts
    • old LiveJournal posts
  • move to just danielsjourney.com
• 2019
  • daniel.industries
• 2020
  • poseur.daniel.industries
    • zola

Process

• High level
  • Private notes and journaling
    • notes app
      • have tried them all, most used was Dendron (RIP) and now Logseq
    • used to be just a folder with .md files with a ruby script for generating from a template
    • a long time ago I had a private MoveableType blog
  • Semi-public
    • 200 words a day
    • then adagia.org
    • now, nothing
  • Public
    • blog
  • The private and semi-private stuff will probably get lost, or at best is much less searchable and fungible.
    • the public blog is the archive
    • as such, a lot of private or semi-public stuff might get imported over time
      • less concern for how polished the work is when it’s going into the archive
• Some of the nuts and bolts
  • still have a rake file left over from Octopress with various tasks I still use today
    • new_post
    • isolate
    • gen_deploy
  • randomjourney script that spits out a new random post from the past for me to garden – I do this rather infrequently

Lessons

• The #1 benefit of maintaining your own blog for 19.5 years is for your own personal benefit
  • not for professional benefit or your personal “brand”
  • for your personal history:
    • remembering
    • learning about yourself
    • nostalgia
• Host yourself
  • Requires the tiniest bit of tech savvy
  • Over a long enough time scale, blog hosts come and go
• Avoid databases if at all possible
  • flat files are awesome
    • searchable from a text editor
    • mass edits from a text editor
    • require a little bit of dev savvy
      • lots of regex find/replace
      • site generators that use flat files usually require some dev env and coding
• Avoid dependencies
  • not just hosts and databases – all tooling
  • daniel.industries is 3 gems (including jekyll)
  • getzola.org is a single rust app
• Permalinks, permalinks, permalinks!
• Err on the side of posting
  • drafts get lost
  • personal note systems change
  • nobody really cares
  • cool people might email you about a post from 19 years ago
• Don’t feel bad for:
  • constantly redesigning
  • constantly fiddling with your tools or process
  • revising history