It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything just for the sake of writing it.
I was around for the good years of blogging. LiveJournal and Xanga were where I lived online, back when saying that out loud was a genuinely cool thing to admit. I was there before SixApart bought LiveJournal, and I was still there when it got sold off to a Russian company and everyone slowly wandered away. I’ve watched most of these platforms run their whole life cycle, launch to landgrab to ghost town.
I started on LiveJournal in the early 2000s, before “social media” was a phrase anyone used. This was the Frank the Goat era, if that means anything to you. If it doesn’t, Frank was the mascot, an actual goat, and the fact that a blogging site had a goat for a mascot tells you most of what you need to know about the internet back then.
It felt smaller. Not smaller in a bad way, smaller like you actually knew the people you were talking to. MySpace was just getting going. The web was still something individual people made, and it hadn’t turned into a machine for scraping every detail of your life out of you whether you were the one posting or the one reading.
Every site looked like a person built it, because a person did. Bad color schemes, weird fonts, music that started playing the second the page loaded. I miss all of it.
It was the wild west and I spent years out in it.
I ran my own domain first. Movable Type, then TypePad, then WordPress once it clearly won. Eventually I drifted onto MySpace and Facebook and Twitter, the same as everybody else, and Twitter was still called Twitter then. Anything longer or more worked out went on a blog somewhere, but usually one with an audience and a subject, not a personal one. Personal stuff went on social. The structured stuff went where people were already reading that kind of thing.
Then the internet turned into something else. We all moved into the social platforms, and they’re good at plenty. Video especially. Anybody anywhere can pick up a phone and show you exactly who they are, and I’m not going to knock that, it’s real progress. But somewhere in the move we lost the part where you made a page that looked like you. That skill just quietly went away.
So I built this to feel like the thing I miss. Not as a nostalgia exhibit. I wanted the actual feeling back, the one those handmade, text heavy pages used to give me. There’s something to owning the space yourself, deciding how it looks and how it goes out into the world. A corner of the internet that’s actually mine, where nobody gets to change the rules on me after I’ve already moved in.
So welcome. This is where I’ll write about the things I care about and want kept somewhere permanent.
More coming soon. Until then, poke around.
Your Interweb Rockstar,
Ray Ray