Ecce Signum

Happy April, everyone! This is National Poetry Month, so I hope you-all are reading and/or writing some verses. My creative time so far this spring has been non-existent, so maybe I’ll listen to some lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University while I am writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the twenty-fifth year in a row.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2024 is: How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?

I built my first website in 1997. It had a tilde (~) in the URL, something like www.wmis.net/~jwinkelm. I used it to play around and learn just enough to get my first real web development job in 2000.

I started the first iteration of this blog in 1999, though the content thereof is lost in the mists of time. Once I had my own domain name, the contents became recoverable through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and thus this blog has continuity back to August of 2000.

In the past 24+ years, Ecce Signum has gone through many changes.

The first few versions were created using static HTML and CSS, created locally on my hand-built desktop computer, and then uploaded via FTP to a directory at a web host, which I think was originally MissoulaWeb, which shortly thereafter became Modwest. Updates were intermittent, due to the many steps necessary to create a post, and also because of how easy it was to accidentally over-write existing content, rather than add to it.

The first version of my website which used content management was also hand-rolled. This version used PHP to generate HTML from hand-written XML files using an XSLT pre-processor. While not necessarily easier than using static HTML, it did allow me to create everything on the website rather than having to upload new files when I wanted to add a new post.

My career was just taking off at the time, so I was blogging frequently, mostly about web and game development topics. I also uploaded a great many Flash files and code examples, which just demonstrates the ephemeral nature of information technologies.

When I decided that what I wanted to do with my website was more complex than I had the time or energy to implement myself, I went looking for blogging software, and landed on TextPattern, a beautiful, simple software package created by the late Dean Allen. This change simplified my blogging practice to the point that I was making updates almost every day, and also created websites for friends using TextPattern, as well as creating a subdomain wherein I could post class notes and communicate with my students when I taught Intro to Web Design at Kendall College of Art and Design.

A few years later I decided that TextPattern was no longer sufficient for my needs, so I re-created this website in Drupal, hosted at the newly-created Drupal Gardens, a hosted service which had been inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, which was itself a huge influence on my career.

When Drupal Gardens closed down in 2016 it caught me by surprise, as I had my own website, as well as the websites for our martial arts class and others I had built for friends and their businesses which had to be migrated or rebuilt. This led me, finally, to WordPress, which is what I am still using today.

Here are some snapshots of previous versions of my site.

• March 2001 (static HTML)
• April 2002 (XML/XSLT)
• June 2002 (XML/XSLT)
• October 2006 (Textpattern)
• July 2011 (Drupal)

I mostly use my blog as an online journal. I post weekly updates about what I have been reading (lots!), what I have been writing (nothing!), and other interesting tidbits. When I have time and energy I post longer essays about various topics I find interesting. In that way, not much has changed in the 25 years I gave been running this blog. It’s where I post things which interest me, which I hope others will find interesting as well.

I have several social media accounts, but I am trying to dial back my presence thereon because, with few exceptions, social media platforms are a shitshow and a time sink and a place where creativity and attention spans go to die.

That being said, social media can be useful for marketing. When I publish new blog entries I will often make posts in my various social media accounts with links to those entries. I try to follow the principles of POSSE, which keeps my content in my own space and less subject to the whims of fascist billionaire manbabies like Musk and Zuckerberg.

If I had to make a distinction between the two, I would say that blogs are “this is me”, and social media is “look at me.”

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you find it interesting.

 

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