The Five-Year Term

I normally mark the anniversary of the whole site rather than this one, but five years of blogging is some milestone. Look at that first day: eleven entries! Now I’m lucky to post that many in a fortnight. And look at those six-figure Blogger entry IDs. Now they’re up to eighteen, which puts mine in the first 0.0000000002% of all Blogger entries.

This is where I should say something thoughtful and reflective about blogging, or complain about journalists who don’t get it (so much for all the essays I’ve posted here), or redesign the entire site with a retro theme. But I’m metablogged out after writing a paper for a conference in February and polishing it up for the proceedings last month (hey, maybe it’ll turn up here before it’s hopelessly out-of-date). Instead, I thought I’d look at what I was linking to back then: specifically, the “Seven Other Blogs” in the sidebar.

Seven? Was there ever a time when I could restrict my daily reads to seven? Apparently there was. So, where are they now?

Jeffrey’s Daily Report is still going strong, if not quite as daily, and I still check in to see what’s up in the world of web design. The trademark orange is long gone, but it’s still the Zeldman we know and love.

Neale once bestrode the blog schoolyard like a colossus, but Wrongwaygoback (now Pearls Before Swine, nee Wetlog) has been quiet for over six months, and saw some long breaks before that. The only Aussie on the list—there weren’t many of us doing it back then.

Jason seems to have done okay. I miss his recursive yellow design. Stewart has moved more than once, and nowadays rarely updates appears to have wiped everything since I visited last week. Anyone would think he has better things to do.

Wren disappeared and reappeared more than once, to the point where I lost track, but I see that she was back for a month or so late last year. Alice is hanging in there, posting brief entries every now and then. Taylor is the only one who still has the same design as back in 2000—perhaps because he’s down to two updates a year.

Nowadays I’d have some other old hands on my list as well, and the rest would be blogs that didn’t even exist before May 2000. Choosing seven to represent all of blogdom would be impossible—I’ve got twice that many on my browser’s Daily tab group, and as many again in Weekly, Infrequent, etc. (I just can’t take to RSS. I like designs.) I should shake them up and get more new ones in there, but I’m too attached to all the others. Write less, damn you all. Except you, and you—you guys write more.

Speaking of blog groups, I tagged along with Shauna to the Scottish Blogmeet on Saturday, which makes it the first specifically blog-related gathering I’ve been to in all these years (Fray Day 4 wasn’t just bloggers). Seemed like a nice bunch (hello, there!). I should set up a “Scottish” tab group.

Oh, and while I’m trying to get the word “blog” into this entry as many times as possible (so that it reaches critical mass and collapses into a blog hole), a couple of changes to this one: the monthly archives now contain the feed entries, giving the world even less reason to look at this page; and I’m thinking that having a button that says “Sign in Blood” on my comments form may have been a tactical error, and that bringing back the preview option might be slightly more welcoming. So that may or may not happen sometime in the next five years.

17 May 2005 · Site News

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