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.