The internet is a funny thing. Once upon a time, we built web pages as online journals, a place we could share our private thoughts with strangers, but in a space our close friends and families would likely never stumble across these thoughts. We’d write about our days, exciting or mundane. We’d post our poetry or lyrics to our new songs. We make lists of our favorite albums or books. We’d shout our pain and our angst into the void, occasionally getting a supportively response from some other lonely soul, hunting the web late at night.
We found other pages we liked, and would create “web rings,” where our pages would link to a random other person in the ring. An arrow at the bottom of the page would take you to another private page. These pages were all hand-coded, so we’d look for styles and designs to incorporate into our own pages. We’d follow and admire, and then fall in love with some stranger’s writings or designs, and then we’d create a “recommendation” page with hyperlinks to our favorites.
Sites like blogger and Livejournal eventually came along, and standardized the whole process. Sometimes we’d get tired of maintaining a site, and just start posting on these more commercial platforms. You still had a lot of formatting freedom, but much of the magic was gone. It was easier to find other pages, though, so it was easier to find an audience. If that was what you were looking for, anyway.
Then came Facebook, on its mission to swallow the world. Where we once posted only to other like-minded souls and befriended strangers that we could relate to and appreciate, now our audience was old high school friends and our families. Sharing on Facebook is easy, but avoiding your grandma is not.
So, here, I return to the old ways. I’m obviously not hand coding this site, but in many other ways I’m going to treat it like the web sites of old. I’ll likely journal a bit, or post random long form thoughts as they come. I’ll share some articles I like, or songs I think you should hear. I’ll post up some pictures as I take them, and maybe the occasional writing exercise. There’ll be a spot for me to slowly share my history, and maybe another for when I start fleshing out a fictional story I’ve been working on.
All in all, this just gonna be a random collection of stuff. If it interests you, ride along with me, and comment so I know you’re here!