I missed the big day last week, but Ideapad turned 13 on November 1.
It isn't often a blog becomes a bar mitzvah, so let us briefly celebrate the occasion. (I suppose I should really post this on a Saturday.)
For comparison's sake, this site is thee years older than the original iPod.
After more than a month of neglect--and really, what's a month or two after three years--I took advantage of Oscar night to work on my home page while the Mrs. watched the Oscars. So my home page is finally new. Whew.
In a fit of abject creativity, my new home page is, well, basically a bunch of links. But that's sort of the point. In an age where one's social profile extends to myriad web sites with poorly interlinked commonalities, I like the idea of having a pivot. So no more netwert.com branding, as I did for more than a decade; instead, a little more me branding, or at least, me-gregation, or whatever the word would be. In due time I'll get the utility of the interior pages of the site to more or less match, and as I play with the site design, I'll give the new home page some much-needed design flair, too.
I also went about perusing my website archives, and I must say, long before it became a paragon of boredom I had some pretty sweet home page ideas. All hail flatbed scanners and randomizer scripts!
So I'm showing my niece, a freshman at the Newhouse School at Syracuse, my web work, and she's all excited by Amy's site and so on, and then I send her to this site, and she says, "Really this is it?"
Sufficiently needled, I am going to get my two-years-overdue redesign in place soon. Netwert.com will have a shiny new home page (incredibly, I used to do them all the time) and some updates to the Ideapad's layout and orientation.
I'd like to think Lindsay is at least impressed that when I began this blog, she was in second grade. But I doubt it. So: onward.
For some unknown reason my most recent links post, which is pushed to my blog from delicious.com/werty once a day, won't stop posting. I went so far as to turn off the notification stream this afternoon, but it's still showing up. Apologies to folks whose RSS feeds are choking with my repeats.
I'm not sure how to fix it--suggestions are welcome (@djacobs, hint hint).
I thought of my go bag yesterday as the city prepared for its annual 9/11 rememberance. Did you have a go bag?
We still do, packed with old shoes and gym shorts and now-sketchy bottles of water and a dog bone or two. In a sign of evolution, there are not yet baby supplies in the bag. Let's hope we never feel compelled to update it.
I commemorate this day, as always, with links back to the related posts on Ideapad:
I've been twiddling with the Ideapad's sidebar to make it more intuitive and useful. Outbound links are now organized by function: written, fed, and connected, more or less. Timely Demise now has a home over there, where it belongs. (TD is turning into a great little blog, too; I encourage you to visit.)
Next up is a long-contemplated overhaul of the home page, which will probably resemble the Ideapad sidebar, since the themes of this era are connectedness and, er, publishing in six or seven different places. At least they'll be easy to find.
The Ideapad quietly celebrated its tenth anniversary Saturday. It debuted on November 1, 1998, a journal of pithy notes and observances buried within an early version of the personal website, shortly after I purchased my own vanity domain.
Over the years, this page has been chronicle and witness to an eventful stage of my life. I've used this space to write about looking for love, falling in love, getting a dog, getting married, having a child. I've journaled my travels across three continents--indeed, this page is older than my passport. I've gotten incredible new jobs, lost jobs, tried my hand at jobs, written about others finding jobs. The common thread for all of it has been the blog.
Thanks in part to the Ideapad, I've been published elsewhere, on websites and in books and, not least, in Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times. I've taught classes, sat on panels, and spoken at industry events from Manhattan to London. I've landed jobs with the help of this blog and been reprimanded by employers (twice) for it.
The page has seen its share of failures. I once posted about a waning interest in writing and promptly lost half my audience. I tried and failed in 2003 to heed some smart advice to do blog consulting; a year later, David Jacobs's Apperceptive hit a home run with it. I never monetized my site or springboarded into full-time blogging, which bothers me more than a little, since I suspect I could have done quite nicely at it, and perhaps still could, if I were able to post four times a day instead of four times a week. All misses.
And yet. With this site I've done more than I ever expected. I've met new people, made friends, entertained a multitude of readers (hi, Mom) and satisfied my creativity a thousand times over. I've had people call me famous, call me crazy, call me Netwert. I participated in history when I used the Ideapad to communicate with the world on 9/11, and the lone post by someone other than me, a hard-hitting recollection of that day, became a historical must-read that still gets thousands of page views monthly.
Somehow, mostly by circumstance, this page has become one of the longest continually published personal sites on the Internet. I share this accomplishment with a fair number of other weblogs that debuted in 1998, the authors of whom became my peers, simply out of kinship; to this day I read their blogs, and now their RSS and Twitter feeds, sharing the past and present with the people who helped create the blog phenomenon.
I have come to realize this site helps define me. The observances and wisecracks and personal notes that live here represent my interests, life and career. I am pleased and proud that, ten years on, the Ideapad is still here, with the same name and URL as when it began. A scan through the archives presents a unique viewpoint on my life, as written for--seen by--a blog. I look forward to whatever it watches me do next.
Well! After years of running it without utilizing it I finally turned Movable Type into the publishing platform for the Ideapad. (Consider: this blog entry was originally dated January 10... talk about the cobbler's kids having the worst shoes.) I now have comments, trackbacks and RSS, so I'm finally catching up to blog standards. Circa 2004 at the least.
The foot-dragging was twofold: one, my coding skills aren't what they used to be, so I had a hard time getting the design just right (you'll notice that I went for "reasonable facsimile" here); and two, my coding interest isn't what it used to be, so I needed some good downtime to wade back into the MT templates and get things sorted out. I believe all the basics, including del.icio.us cross-posting, are functional.
Next up is porting over some of the archives, enabling Digg, and reminding the blog aggregators that this site isn't static after all.