Blogs are portals to the past

classicweb@indieweb.social posted a screenshot of Kottke.org from all the way back in 2001 and it led me down a delightful little rabbit hole of old blog posts this morning.

🙇 🙇 🙇
kottke.org on December 14, 2001
https://web.archive.org/web/20011214224826if_/http://www.kottke.org:80

It’s funny how much I stress over what people (or even I) will think of the things I’ve written on my blog a few months or years down the road. Sometimes I go back and cringe at posts that were rushed, or just bad takes I had. Maybe I’ll catch a punctuation error, or realize I used an Oxford comma on every post for three weeks straight and suddenly stopped.

Who really cares though? No one’s grading our blogs. We don’t get penalized for not writing everything in sanitized APA style. We don’t get a bonus if everything is perfect for 120 days in a row.

Skimming through decades of Kottke’s old posts actually made me realize how silly it is to make such a fuss about this stuff.

He didn’t know what he was doing back then any more than I do today. But he kept doing it and now he’s virtually a household name. At least if you’re as online as I am. At the very least, he has an online archive of his thoughts and interests that span nearly three decades at this point. And he’s probably made a lot of friends all over the world in the process.

Aside from getting a little sentimental, it’s been really cool to go back and see different historical events through the lens of a blog.

September 11, 2001, for example. It’s something we’ve talked about so much over the last 25 years or so that it’s just part of who we are, you know? Everyone has their own account of where they were, what was going through their head… Aside from looking up old news clips, what better place to get a raw, unfiltered reaction to something like that than a snapshot of a blog from the day it happened?

Even if you’re not a direct force for change and improvement in the world, you’re providing a first hand account of everything you post about over the years. You’re part of the conversation, and provide a record of what someone thought about different things. One day we’ll be able to look back on our posts and remember how we felt when the worst US president in history was reelected, or when OpenAI released the first public version of ChatGPT. Maybe reflect a bit on Apple’s Liquid Glass announcement.

The things we talk about day to day don’t always seem significant. They usually aren’t, probably. In 20 years, will anyone care about how I switched to Kagi from Google, and then back to Google, then back to Kagi? Or that I finally bought the newest Zelda game two years after launch and didn’t really like it?

Probably not… but maybe!

It’s like a time capsule. I’ve heard a few people say that here on the indie web; that it’s better to keep all of your old content in tact rather than pruning out the less polished posts.

As much as I hate going back and reading some of my own posts, I plan on keeping up with blogging for the foreseeable future. I think it’ll be pretty cool one day to look back, see what design I was using and the things that mattered to me on any given day in my history.

This is just another reason I love blogging and the Wayback Machine. <3