Over Ten Years of This Blog

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#posts #website



With March being so busy, I missed the anniversary of this website and blog. On 3rd March 2016, I wrote my first blog post. You can find it here.[1]. So that means I've had this website for ten years. When I started this blog, Brexit hadn't happened yet. Trump hadn't happened yet. I was living in Surrey. Since that time, I've moved to Bristol, then moved to Gloucestershire. I was with my girlfriend ten years ago and now we have been married for almost four years. A lot has changed in the past years. I'm now close to 40, whereas when I started I was a fresh-faced 28 years old.

The site has gone through a few changes - I started on WordPress, moved to Jekyll and then over to Eleventy. I think I'm pretty happy with my current choice, unless it stops being developed. But one thing these changes have taught me is the power of portability. All my blog posts are now simple markdown files, so if I have an issue with my current static site generator, I'll move to another.

I've written a fair bit in those ten years - one book of short stories, five poetry pamphlets in various formats, a handful of zines[2]. I've got 530 blog posts on the site, which isn't loads but also isn't nothing. There's also over 800 notes made public. It's a lot of words! It feels good to have an archive I can dive into and search through.

Looking back on the various posts, it's clear I've tried to tailor my website to different audiences at different times. Is it a blog about creativity, or a place where I can publish my poetry? How about discussion of the craft of poetry, or more of a political blog? The truth is this site is everything all at once. The conclusion I've come to is no one really visits personal sites anymore[3], so I might as well throw what I want on here. The audience was me all along. Turns out I've always been writing primarily for myself and that's OK, I don't have to twist the site to reflect a certain audience. My interests are varied and this site will likely reflect that. I've spoken before about wanting to make this website personal again, and I'm slowly getting around to that idea. Expect more blog posts about random topics going forward.

So here's to another ten years. Hopefully the world is still here and as I approach 50, I'm still writing nonsense.

  1. It's fine, a bit pretentious and I'd like to rewrite it, but then I think that about most of my writing. ↩︎

  2. Find them all here. Almost everything is free to download, with no email required. ↩︎

  3. Expect you. You're great. ↩︎


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