This website is twenty years old
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the first post I published on this website.
Two decades!
As I'm still half a year shy of forty, it means I've had this website for more than half of my life. Which feels ridiculous, because it must mean I'm no longer a spoiled and privileged teenager with all the world at my feet. Instead, I'm a spoiled and privileged middle-aged man with his days of promise solidly in the rear-view mirror. Which checks out, I guess...
A lot has happened in twenty years. Back then, blogging was all the rage. To the extent that I perceived it as a bit contrived.
"Blogging? You mean just sharing your thoughts on your own website like I've been doing forever (we're talking years) already?"
It even made me drag my feet about setting up my own personal website, in a "I'm too cool" sense. A complete affectation. In all honesty, it was probably just because I was busy being the webmaster of another website. Now there's a title I'm ready to reclaim.
Anyways, blogs were the thing back then, and so I started this one.
Once, I heard someone say that, in fashion, things come back in twenty year cycles. What was cool and hip and trendy twenty years back will probably cool and hip and trendy today.
I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't true in a broader sense than just fashion. Certainly blogs are more of a thing again today than they've been at any point over the past 10-15 years. Not that this blog will ever be cool and hip and trendy — that train left the station many years ago. Nevertheless, it feels like a little honour badge to have survived a full fashion cycle.
Of course, venture into the post archive and you'll find that I haven't exactly been an active blogger throughout the full cycle. After warming up, I reached peak activity around 2007. I continued to post somewhat regularly up until 2010. After that, except for a brief spell of Norwegian writing in 2014, it lay mostly dormant until I resurrected it in late 2023.
To me, that's the point of having a personal website. It's yours and it can be whatever you want it to be. And when you change your mind, there's nobody stopping you from tearing it down and rebuilding it to your liking.
I won't bother speculating too much about what the next twenty years will hold for this website. Because I don't have a clue. But, if I'm alive and well at that point, I'm quite confident that this website will still be around for its fortieth anniversary two decades hence. Hopefully I'll then be sharing plans for my impending retirement and hopes and dreams for the remainder of my days.
If you want fuller recounting of the history of this site and, check out the post A brief history of this blog which I wrote last year. And if you still want more meta-content, my entry to the Blog Question Challenge 2025 talks about why and how I write here.