Over the break I finally completed a little project to unearth all my old web content and assemble it into a lightly curated archive. The material spans from 1998 to 2012 and was stored in the databases of three different systems: one I built myself with PHP 3, one based on PhpWiki, and the most recent a Nucleus blog. I extracted the entries and metadata from various dump files and then built a static site using nanoc. All of the layouts are essentially the same and render more or less correctly, though the primitive tables are not sure what to do with the additional pixels.
The words were mostly for the drawer, or for the void. My open hope for the wiki was that friends and strangers would make edits without my knowledge, until the entries were faceless artifacts or multidimensional gardens of forking paths.
Reading after a gap of one or two decades, I do not know if the experiment was a failure or a success. The server logs are long vanished. My memory makes claims that are categorical and totally believable. All I can conclude from the evidence is that the structure gradually evolved from an interlinked web of fragments to a linear series of dated posts, to which I bolted on an external system for comments, thereby severing the chorus into a speaker and an audience. By 2007, I had switched to dedicated blogging software.
I stopped posting anything of substance in 2011, alongside a concerted effort to dump social media and to live more of my life offline. For several years I had no internet at home and no data on my phone. I biked around Chicago and danced and drank and made anti-functional pottery. That too transformed into a linear trajectory, with a demanding job and a new family. I wouldn't trade them for the world, but I've regretted how the lack of time and energy has made me the perfect target for Twitter and its compulsive model of endless scrolling.
So, in an attempt to be more active, here I am, logging back in to write for the desk drawer and the void. But no more content management systems, not even the static kind. Let's get smol.