Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through this site as well as all my paper journals and digitizing everything into my Apple Notes app. It has been an enjoyable, interesting, and at times, comical experience. If you have any access to who you were 25+ years ago in the form of writing or otherwise, you should check it out, because it’s hilarious. I guarantee you’ll come away with some version of the same thing I did:
Man, I didn’t know shit.
I’ve gone through all my posts here – 700+ since 1996 and reread them all. It’s been a strange trip. The one thing I came away with though is a thought I had a few years ago as well, namely, ‘no one is going to go back and read all these.’ In a lot of respects, the advent of social media was the death knell for the blog. There are many still doing it, but it was revealing to see how many people’s blogs I’ve linked to over the years in posts – and how few are still up or even active now. Many are just frozen in a state of stasis from whenever the person abandoned it years ago or lost their password. Many urls are now something else entirely.
I feel for the most part these days, if you have a personal website or a ‘blog’, the only reason folks really go there is if they:
a. have just met you in person or come across you online and are interested in knowing more, or;
b. are an old acquaintance that has remembered or stumbled upon you and wants to catch up on what you’re doing.
In either case, the likelihood of them taking a deep dive into your last 357 blog posts is slim. They want the quick and dirty and they only have 15 minutes for it. Such is the state of our current attention economy. Social media is of course great for this, but it also comes with all the garbage that we are all aware it’s populated with. You either take the good with the bad, or just leave the space all together.
The other reason I kinda-sorta didn’t just nuke all the past posts was because occasionally someone would find the post via a browser search for something that was in the post and I would get a rando comment or contact that way. The thing is, nowadays, SEO is an absolute gong show and you have to be constantly on top of your game if you want to be found in the morass of the internet for anything and I ain’t got time for that kind of hassle.
Maybe 2 years ago I hatched an idea to just turn my site into a basic ‘about/update’ page for Kent Fackenthall. I was just going to post an update to the page once in a while and then delete it/overwrite it with a new one. You either got it while it was posted or you didn’t. This was problematic for a few reasons – it was a lot of work to re-do the page each time, and also I have some folks that follow along with RSS readers or the Subscribe feature baked into WordPress so they get a new email whenever there’s a new post. If you’re interested in that, you can subscribe in the footer below. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to make sure folks still got updates, as well as figure out how to format the site to my liking.
Going through all my old posts bubbled this idea up to the surface again and I finally dug into the WordPress Full Site Editor that was launched back whenever, and sorta mucked around with it to get it to do what I wanted to do. So now, I’m happy with the look of the site, I can make a new post and it will be the only one live on the site at any given time, and subscribers will still receive an email notification.
So now you’ve got the home page which will feature the latest post until it isn’t. When I make a new post, subscribers get an email. And you’ve got the Bio page which is probably more comprehensive than it should be.
Hope wherever you’re reading from this finds you well. Thoughts? Get in touch.
Edit: Soon changed my mind about all of this, which if you’re now reading this is pretty evident by the site layout. Thanks for playing along.