Today marks twenty years since I started blogging. I bought viscariello.com in May of 2005 with the intention of making it a bit easier to keep in touch with friends and family after I moved to Chicago. In September, I decided to play around with the WordPress blogging software that came with a StartLogic site. Sitting at a small writing desk in my three-flat apartment in Wheaton, I tapped away on an old laptop, and produced the following:

Testing. Testing. This is my first attempt at a “web log,” or “blog,” as it were. Blog blog blog. Blog blog.

–Me, “First post,” September 1, 2005.

I look back on these last two decades of blogging– which was really ten years of blogging and ten years of occasionally remembering that I have a blog– and think:

…I forgot that “blog” was short for “web log.”

…it was so much trickier to run the website and blog back then. I would repeatedly accidentally erase everything by somehow screwing up the WordPress updates. I’d panic for a few hours, finally figure out how to restore it, make an ugly mess of the whole thing, add a “Part II” or “Part III” to the end of the blog title to indicate a restart before abandoning the practice because it technically didn’t make sense because it wasn’t an nth volume because all— not some— of my posts were still present, curse StartLogic and WordPress for not making the whole thing much easier, realize a few days later that they had, in fact, made it easier and I just hadn’t read the instructions closely enough, and then carry on writing. Then I just switched everything over to WordPress hosting and everything got much easier.

…I don’t write often enough to justify calling it a “journal,” which suggests something written daily, or at least more regularly than “whenever I feel like it.” Maybe a fifth or sixth name change is in order. Or maybe I should write more.

…the blog was a new and different way to connect with people. That way was quickly eclipsed by social media, messenger apps and groups, and real monetizable subscription platforms. Ah well.

…it once rekindled the embers of a long-lost love, but there’s been some upside, too. It opened dialogue with distant relatives the world over. It helped me get and keep in touch with old friends, colleagues, students, and so forth. And if Akismet and Jetpack are to be believed, I make hundreds, sometimes thousands of new bot-friends every day. They’ll come in handy post-singularity.

…it revealed, and reminds me, that what I find amusing is not the same as what others do, and that I don’t care.

…it is nothing profound, but it is fun.