Keep bloggin’

I was on vacation with my family when the oldest entry on my site turned 5000 days old. Without access to my computer, I wasn’t able to write a proper article, but now I got to it.

5000 days ago this site didn’t exist. Nor did its predecessor on WordPress. So how can the oldest entry be 5000 days old? According to the About page, …

[…] some threads have been posted in as early as 2010, back then this happened on third-party sites. I launched the actual blog in 2011 on WordPress.

In the early days, I didn’t do things in true IndieWeb spirit, but eventually I got to the point where all my content became available on this site. I migrated historic content too, and as a result, an index page for the year 2010 exists.

Check your calendar

Why 5000 days and not any number of years instead? Well, what would be the base for any celebration? Still October 31, 2010, the first tweet? Or should I ignore third-party content and use January 26, 2011, the date of my first article on WordPress. What about December 23, 2011, the day I bought the cssence.com domain? March 30, 2012, the initial deployment on that domain? It’s complicated, but why bother?

I didn’t plan ahead calculating 5000 days, instead I stumbled upon the milestone by accident. But the reason for writing the corresponding note has anyhow been a different one:

We’re only halfway through the year, and 2024 is already my best #blogging year ever. Out of the 250 posts written in almost 14 years, more than ⅕th are a result of the last six months. And given how crappy 2023 has been for me healthwise, I couldn’t be happier.

I’m back

I enjoy blogging more than ever.

If you do not own your own space on the web yet, I encourage you to read “Into the Personal-Website-Verse” by Matthias Ott.

As for this site, I see many new articles on the horizon. I’ll also set time aside to document more Easter eggs. And I’ll expect lots of tinkering with the underlying code that gives my content a cozy home. Take a peak at my backlog:

• A template mechanism for new blog posts is long overdue, currently I write a new post by copying an old one and deleting its content. 🙄
• My comment system is still manual labour, but I may have reached the limit of the manual until it hurts IndieWeb principle. Having ditched Twitter for the second and final time allows me to focus solely on Mastodon, so this would be a good time to implement a semi-automatic solution. 😶
• Last but not least, I’ve started working on a new theme. 🤩

Time will tell when these things go live.

Here’s to the next 5000 days.