Blogging is dead. Long live the blog.

Since it’s been over a year since I last wrote anything, I may as well admit that blogging is no longer an avocation I’m interested in keeping up. I’ll doubtless continue to tweet, and occasionally post photos to flickr and videos to vimeo, but the long-form blog post—or journal entry, as I preferred to call them—no longer holds my interest. Whether the fault lies with the ever-shortening modern attention span or my sheer laziness, I’ll leave others to decide. Before I depart the blogosphere, however, a little retrospection is in order.

Charlottesville VA, 2001

I’ve known my way around HTML since the mid-1990s, when it transitioned from version 2 to 4 and when Netscape was still a viable browser. During my first two years of college I picked up CGI and PHP, ultimately settling on Grey Matter as my blogging tool of choice. At the time (2002-2003) Noah Grey maintained the code himself, but he has since left the internet. The system was ideal for the student web space I had available, which offered minimal server-side scripting and no databases. Fortunately, none of my early blogging exists. I don’t recall how much of it there was, but I’m sure it was awful.

Norfolk VA, 2003

By the summer of 2003 blogging was mainstream among my peers. Several friends used LiveJournal, which at the time had implemented an invite system. I ended up using LJ for a solid three years, with temporary ventures at the now-defunct ModBlog and now-ubiquitous BlogSpot. LJ may not have had the best visual styles (though these could be improved with some tedious modification), having most of one’s friends on the same system is the main draw. I’ve since imported most of those old entries; here is a representative sampling:

Honolulu HI, 2005

• New Age Pool Results in a mock sports broadcasting tone. A definite you-had-to-be-there moment.
• Stream of consciousness event recaps.
• An odd mixture of objectivism, food and dating.
• Lengthy memoir-style entries in multiple parts.
• Attempts at abstract blogging.

Dubai UAE, 2007

I began 2006 by installing WordPress on some cheap server space and started Patrick unscripted in it’s current form. WP’s extensibility and ease of use won me over from the start. I probably redesigned the site every 6 months, mostly for the pure enjoyment of it. The blog took a decidedly grammatical and observational bent:

• Calvin window stickers.
• The difficulties of finally growing up.
• Technological activism.
• Improbable life goals.
• Thoughts on the nascent 2008 presidential campaign, in 2007.
• The return of the memoir.
• A little math on the rise of Wikipedia.

By the end of 2008 the blog became a stream of links that interested me (ironically labelled “digressions” long after there was no journal to digress from). Link sharing is, of course, facilitated by other services (Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) so there’s hardly a need to maintain a personal blog for that sole purpose.

It’s been a good run, but it’s time to move on.