I’ve been meaning to write a post about this forever, but someone else at The Ringer did such a great job of it. Check it:

The Day the Good Internet Died

The one thing I find interesting about this article is the thought that maybe it wasn’t that the death of Google Reader killed off blogging, but that the death of blogging killed off Google Reader. It’s true that we all devolved into social media doom-scrolling instead of actually reading, but another factor is that Google was pushing people into Google Plus, and the asinine assumption that people would rather find what they wanted to read by scrolling through eleventy million messages rather than going to a list of exactly what they wanted to read. (What Google actually meant was that they wanted you to scroll through eleventy billion messages, with every fourth message being an ad someone paid them to run.)

I’m old enough to remember the first wave of blogs and interesting/time-wasting web sites, because I spent a lot of the late 90s and early 00s paging through them while I was at work or sitting at home without cable TV. But in that pre-Reader era, I did it by having folders of bookmarks. I’d go to my “daily” folder and sequentially click through each bookmark, trying to remember where I left off the day before. This was a great way to waste time, but not user-friendly, and it required me to remember where I left off. (I still had a memory then, which did help.)

Compared to this, Google Reader was amazing. I could keep track of everything in one place, and read the things in order, with counts of unread articles, and indications of what I already did see. All of this was possible because of RSS, which was a perfect example of the interoperable web. The closely-related iGoogle also had the ability to make a widget based on a web page’s RSS feed, and RSS was very integral to the advent of the podcast. It was so mind-blowing and vital at the time, that I hacked together a script that would output RSS for the pre-WordPress version of this blog, which was hacked together with a bunch of homebrew shell scripts, emacs extensions, PHP, and gaffer’s tape.

After the death of GR, I went on to Feedly, but every blog I read either died a high-profile death, or stagnated with no new posts. I keep hearing about these revival of blogging things and people saying Medium or or Longreads or Substack or whatever the hell else is the next big thing. And no matter what it is, it devolves into people selling Tony Robbins-esque bullshit classes on how to get rich in real estate. There are still a ton of people blogging, but “blogs” are now the things hanging off the side of dentists’ web sites and posting daily listicles about proper gum care to increase their SEO.

I used to bitch about how the money people and con men would fuck up the web long before the web even existed. I started throwing letters into this void (ala usenet) before AOL’s Eternal September started. In 1995, at my first real job. I was writing docs for one of the first web browsers that added SSL, while a marketing drone stood in front of my desk barking about how they needed to ship this immediately so they could sell fifty-dollar t-shirts on the web for the first time ever, and I thought this is not going to end well. And it didn’t.

And now, every time Google drops a vital service or Facebook decides they want me to look at stuff in a new inconvenient way, I always have a first thought: maybe I’m just too old for this stuff, and when I lose my shit because I’m forced to watch a TikTok video to figure out how to change my refrigerator’s water filter, I’m doing the same thing my parents did in 1987 when they had an aneurysm and started screaming about the Japanese taking over because channel 16 suddenly moved to channel 34. But then I always remember: follow the money. Google Reader got killed so we could be forced to watch more ads. The Facebook algorithm is set up to force us to watch more ads. Amazon stopped putting the names of products in their receipts because Google was using them to sell more ads. Everything is because of money. I was right. The money people ruin everything.

Baker’s article brings up an old Alex Balk article, which says the following:

Here I will impart to you Balk’s Third Law: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016.

This is so fucking true it hurts. I blogged almost every day in 2010-2011, frequently wishing blogging was as good as it was in 2004, which is when I was bitching about how much better personal journals (the predecessor to blogs) were back when I started this stupid site in 1996. Now I wish things were as good as 2011.

I always wonder if there will be another era of Good Internet, or if we’re in the middle of it and I don’t realize it. All I know is blogging is still important to me, because I know as long as I keep paying my bills, I can still keep my stuff here, even if nobody can find it anymore.

I think I finished editing and republishing old entries yesterday. The grand total is that I have 1,362 posts, with a word count of 1,059,000 or so words. I’m finding that this is big enough that it cripples either of the main SEO plugins for WordPress. That would be a problem if I was trying to make money on real estate or vitamin sales, but I’m not, so I disabled it.

I still need to figure out this theme - it feels like the headings are too big and inefficient, and I do miss having the widgets on the side for the archives and such. And I need to have better integration with this and Facebook and/or Twitter. I would like to just blog here and spend a lot less time on social media sites.

Another thing I need to do is there are a ton of posts that have no title, which doesn’t work well with the various widgets at the bottom of the page. But the idea of going through a few hundred posts and adding dumb titles like “ate lunch” is a bit exhausting. I just did a big run of them, and I think I still have a few hundred more to go.

Now that this stuff is almost settled, I need to figure out what I’m doing with this thing. My only real goal is the same one I have every January 1: a new post every day. But I don’t know what to post about. After reading every post over the last week, I feel like I’ve already strip-mined any old stories of memories and nostalgia. There definitely won’t be any trip reports in the near future, and not a lot of day-to-day news except “sat in my home office for twelve hours and then watched four hours of Married at First Sight.” I guess I need to step up the reading and should do something more constructive with my boob tube time.

Definitely no current events or politics. The upside of all of this tedium is I spent a lot less time looking at the news. So there’s that. I should probably go back into my list of starred Wikipedia articles and write about each of them. I have a bad habit of falling down k-holes, starring articles, and then wondering why the hell I bookmarked comparative religion scholar Frithjof Schuon years ago. (Still trying to figure this out - only thing I can think of is he died in Bloomington. Maybe I helped him with his VAX mail at some point.)

Not a lot to report otherwise. It was a typical NYE, and I was asleep by about ten. We rented The King of Staten Island and I was very mixed on it. I should write a longer post on it, but it’s lunch time.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d pulled every entry on here and was slowly adding them back. That’s basically all I’ve been doing for the last several days. I had close to 1600 entries before starting this crusade. I’m down to about 100 in the queue, although I wouldn’t mind doing some more general cleanup. I also need to do more work to get this site completely modernized. I am not entirely happy with this theme, and there’s some plugin changes that could be made to speed things up.

It’s really weird reading through 23 years of entries in one clip. A few observations:

• I really like the first few years, when I was in Seattle and the word “blog” hadn’t been invented yet, and this was more of a diary than anything else. It’s fun to read the old entries where I’m talking about what I ate for lunch or what happened that day on the drive to work. It was a lot easier to belt out short updates like that when there were no expectations and there was nothing else to compare this site with.
• In the years before I published my first two books, all of my writing about writing is extremely cringe-worthy. I’m glad I got past that.
• I always forget how bad my early system was for running this site. I reluctantly switched to Wordpress pretty late in the game. When I started, I had this crazy system where I had to telnet to the server machine, type everything in emacs, then run a C program to generate the table of contents on the left. The program broke every new year’s day, and required manual surgery to reset everything to January. I later half-fixed this with PHP, but it was still ugly for a long time.
• I also forget about how I had my own garbage system for hosting photos on this site. I would put all of the image files in a directory on the server, then run a shell script that used mogrify to resize them to web and thumbnail sizes, then build the index.html file. Brutal stuff.
• I think I owe a general apology or amends to anyone who read this journal from about 2002 to 2005. I was a real contrarian asshole about all things political. I’ve been scrubbing that stuff, because it’s so cringe and horrible.
• I don’t know how I got as far as I did in my writing career without knowing that commas and periods go inside the quotes. I can probably blame this on learning to program in C before I really got into writing.
• Speaking of punctuation, I sure did like using the f word as a piece of it. I should stop doing that.
• I was seriously on fire in the early 2010s. I think I’ve written 200 entries in the last six years, but I easily wrote 200 in just 2010-2011.
• I have a lot of stories that were on this blog and later collected into books. I’ve removed them from here. I think if you didn’t read it in a free book that came out in 2003, you aren’t going to read it.
• I also pared back a ton of posts announcing “see my story in…” that had a URL that points to a Chinese gambling site now.
• I don’t know how I ever survived seven years in New York. Reading the stories of my trials and tribulations back then are hilarious. I’ve unfortunately had to trim a few of them back for career-limiting-behavior reasons. But living in Astoria with no AC really can drive you to drink, eh?
• I think about 40% of the 1500-some entries here have to do with dental trauma or being sick. I am really glad I stopped drinking a case of full-sugar Coke every day, because that’s calmed down both problems somewhat.
• I used to have a separate section of the site with a bunch of long-form trip journals. Some of those got collected into my Vegas book, but may more were pulled from the site out of general apathy. I often wonder if I should put those back, or clean them up and put them in a book that nobody will buy. Something to think about later, I guess.
• Music reviews are a real waste of my time. Luckily nobody reads them anymore.
• I took all the links off the side (now bottom) of the page. I will probably put those back as I find more blogs worth following.
• I really need to pick up the blogging more. It’s a much better time-waster than Candy Crush or reading the news.

I really do think I need to spend more time here next year, and a lot less time on Facebook. I need better integration or whatever to drive people from FB to here, but of course all of that is a crapshoot, and when I post a link from here on there, only three people see it. I don’t know if a mailing list or the return of RSS feeds or something else will make this any better.

In that vein, I’ve reluctantly turned back on comments. They are all in “strict” mode and you need a login to use them. It uses Disqus, so it also uses Facebook, Twitter, or Google logins. I moderate all comments. Feel free to add to the discussion, but don’t be an ass.

Hopefully I’ll finish this quest by the end of the year, although that’s tomorrow, so I better hurry.

Pretty low-key Christmas here. Three different Zoom calls, which were okay, but when you spend ten hours a day in Zoom calls, that can be problematic. No presents or anything. Sarah made this gigantic chunk of prime rib, and we watched the original movie Fargo. The giant chunk of meat may be my final coda on being an omnivore, as per a discussion with my cardiologist, but we’ll cover that when the New Year New Me crap starts up next week.

Forgot to mention, but The Koncast is officially dead. Hasn’t been updated in years, so that’s kind of obvious, but I got sick of paying LibSyn every month for hosting something that nobody listened to in the first place. Maybe someday I’ll give it another run, especially since I have a few hundred bucks of podcasting gear in a box in the closet now. It was fun while it lasted, though. The in-person podcasts were the best, but there’s the rub, especially now.

In a fit of depression/stupidity/paranoia, I deleted this entire blog yesterday. Then I realized what a dumb idea that was, and I started restoring it. Problem is, I have about 1500 posts, and I need to go through them one by one and re-add them. There is a way to bulk add everything, but I really need to vet and edit everything. I’m roughly halfway through it, and it is incredibly time-consuming. Word count-wise, that’s roughly three times the size of the bible. So this may take a bit.

But, it’s also fun. I forget how much great writing I’ve put on this thing in the last twenty-three years. This thing started with daily updates about nothing, and reading that stuff really makes me miss Seattle. There’s a lot of cringe in my early days as a writer, and all of this was happening before self-publishing was a thing, aside from going to Kinko’s and xeroxing the stuff by hand. (Back when there was a Kinko’s.) I think I had the assumption I was going to write these books and… find an agent? I don’t know. But it’s somewhat humorous to see how naive I was back then.

I also keep thinking maybe I should self-pub another book compilation of this stuff. It would be great to read it on paper, and it would be somewhat impressive/amusing/masturbatory to see a curated collection of these as a 1200-page slab of dead trees. I did a book for the 1997-1999 entries, and it looked great, but I think it sold maybe eleven copies, with half of those being me and the other half being people who thought it was JA Konrath murder mystery. So, maybe not a good waste of my time.

I can’t believe I still have another week off of work. I’ve completely lost track of days. It’s wonderful.

Anyway, blogging - I am not happy with this WordPress theme, so I may screw with that after I get these posts added. Many thoughts of what else I should do here, especially in the new year, but I feel like I should take all of the energy I wasted this year in doom-scrolling and Facebook and apply it into writing posts here, even if nobody reads them.

So here’s how behind I am: this site has been running the Wordpress Twenty Eleven theme since 2012 or so. Now that the Twenty Twenty-One theme has just shipped, I decided to upgrade to the Twenty Twenty theme.

A few features and differences:

• A lot more space and readability, with better typography (I think)
• Much easier to read and navigate on a mobile device.
• The stuff that used to be in the sidebar has moved to the bottom of the page. Look below to see things like archives, links, recent posts, and all that jazz.
• I nuked the little “share to social media” stuff because nobody ever used it.
• There is a privacy policy. This is stupid and useless, but at some point Google will probably ding me points because I don’t have one. Bottom line, I don’t collect data, and don’t sue me.

I think that’s it. Let me know if you see anything obviously broken.