When I launched the Ideapad, on November 1, 1998, it was rather ugly, it cribbed off others, and it didn’t even have its own directory.* But what it was, it miraculously still is: a home online for me to publish independently, everything from mundane thoughts on shopping and puppies to important perspectives on usability, digital life, the Internet business and my own evolution.
Fifteen years on, the Ideapad is one of the world’s oldest and longest-running online blogs, which I take less with surprise or pride so much as contentedness. The good ol’ ‘Pad is still here. I’ve gone through a couple of phases where I almost stopped writing—once, I even blogged about not blogging, and promptly lost half my audience–and in retrospect the best thing about this page is its consistency.
I’ve had more than my share of reminiscences in this space over the past few months, so it’s best to look forward here, to many more years of satisfying self-publishing. Thanks for reading.
-David
* My incredulous kudos go out to Net Access, my old web host, for fighting link rot and keeping my old directory live, for more than a decade of uptime since I deactivated my account. I’m not even sure they have individual user accounts anymore, but my old pages are still live. The World Wide Web purist in me is very appreciative of this.