Fozzie: “I don’t know how to thank you guys.”
–“The Muppet Movie”
Kermit: “I don’t know why to thank you guys.”
So…. what’s going on here? Why the sudden desire to put stuff, and pushing it out to other places and whatnot? Well, it’s a long story.
A long time ago I set all this up because I wanted a place to put stuff to share with the world. Writing on websites was pretty new in 2000, and I got on the bandwagon because why not. I posted stuff left and right, and of course didn’t expect people to flock here and interact – why would they, I had nothing really to offer except, well, me – and I was mostly fine with that. Somewhere around 2006 I moved the site from being hosted on my own home computer which meant keeping that online all the time, to an actual hosting company. At the same time I moved it to WordPress instead of Slashcode because the latter was notoriously difficult to maintain while my hosting company (Dreamhost) had a nice single-click installation process. I do systems administration as my day job, I don’t want to do it when I’m not getting paid, so that was a huge bonus to me. I was doing well, even putting up some new stuff, when I discovered Google Analytics. Now I could see what kinds of traffic my site was getting, and while that was never the goal, it was a neat thing to look at. I want to say that was some time after 2009 or so, which would have been some time after joining Facebook and connecting with a lot of people I’d known over the years.
After having GA set up for a while, I went looking and realized something. Nobody went to my website. Nobody intentionally, anyway. Remember how people said sites like Livejournal were just “screaming into the void” and nobody looked at stuff there? Yeah, turns out that was my site too. Now, sure, I wasn’t planning on having a high-traffic bastion of entertainment or instructional data, but still I figured I’d have something a little more active than random people who clicked because a page showed up in the results after searching for “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.” But the analytics didn’t lie, I was also screaming into the void.
I’ve mentioned before that I like to talk… a bit. Over the years I’ve watched people tune out while I’m talking. A fun trick is to start going off on some outlandish thing and see if they catch on, or see how much you can keep going until they suddenly realize the last few lines were about an alien invasion or crossdimensional rift that flooded your basement with catnip mice. I thought, if I write things here then maybe that’ll scratch that itch – I’ll feel like I’m getting to talk about the things I wanted to, and others won’t have to listen to it. But when you see that nobody’s actually looking, you realize you might as well be talking to a wall. And I can do that just as easily without exercising my fingers – something which some days is a lot more difficult than others (and if you have no idea why that would be, I went over it in another post that nobody read 😛 ). But why wasn’t anyone coming here to read things anyway? Well, I think a big part of it was that everything was corralled into a single place, a book where all of our faces would gather and meet and chat and post. And so the idea of leaving that place to go look at something else.. well, that’s like work for some. Work that they don’t want to do, and I can’t blame them. If I can get 90% of what I want from one place, why go bouncing to other places as well? Just be glad with what I’ve got there. But that means, if you want to put your stories out there for people to see, you have to put them in that space where they’re looking. But for various reasons, that place is falling apart more and more. Ideologies that don’t mesh with my own, rules that oppose what I think are good and just, all kinds of things. And I’m not the only one thinking that, others are as well. In fact, Wil Wheaton posted a thing about it, and while I’d been debating what to do at that point, reading my thoughts coming from someone else whose writing and engagement I respect solidified it for me.
So, that’s the plan. Try to write here the things I want to share with people, and hope that the time is right that people will come read it especially if I put some effort into sharing those links elsewhere. I’m also on other platforms, and I need to set up a sidebar thing linking to them or something, I’ll get around to that too. One other thought that has come up before, especially with the amount of fun I have doing audio work, is to do a podcast. That seems like pissing into the wind just as much as (or even moreso than) a website these days, but it’s something I’m still thinking about. Having enough content to publish is the problem for something like that usually, but maybe if I set the low expectation of “you’ll get something when I have something to give” it would work out. Don’t know, but love to hear your thoughts about it.
Oh, one last thing, since I mentioned hearing your thoughts. You may have noticed comments are off all over here. I got tired of dealing with spam comments long ago, and turned off all comments on all posts. I may try to figure out how to turn that back on in a way that I’m happy with dealing with them, but… not sure. You can reach me in a number of ways, though – including in IRC which is linked right on the sidebar there. Meanwhile, here’s a photo of a cat.
