Happy blog-iversary to one of the originals

Happy 23rd blog-iversary to Ton Zjjlstra’s blog. He is one of the originals, and a person I still read daily:

My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).

Mine too, although in the dark social media years, it became a bit dormant as I posted on Facebook and twitter, where the engagement was much higher and often more interesting. But not any more. The cost of those platforms was too high, because the speed of interaction eroded my attention too badly. I’m in recovery from those platforms, and part of that means taking back this space. The empty carbs of social media engagement have been replaced by the delicious savouring of much more infrequent but much more thoughtful connection.

Speaking of which, it seem that since June I’ve been in a pattern that has established itself as a practice. My posts generally fall into two types of categories now. There are the longer essays that relate in some way to my professional life. If you’ve subscribed by email to this blog, or follow me on LinkedIn those are the ones you will see. You might get a few a month.

The other kind of post is the old school blog post, like this one, very much in the vein of Ton’s quote above. These are things I have noticed that I think you might enjoy too (or not), and these notes become my little memory palace. They are literally about anything. In a way my blog has become my searchable “morning pages” for writing and getting things out of my head before my day starts. I’ m not sure every reader of this blog has an early-21st century idea of what these meandering thoughts are, but essentially they are annotated links. A “web log” if you will. If you subscribe to my blog through RSS, or stumble upon it through a search or a link posted to Mastodon or Bluesky, you get these ones as well. Enjoy the typos, poor grammar, half-thoughts, broken links and strange questions!

We can engage on those platforms, but I’m happy if you have something to contribute to the conversation here, where the whole world will see it and can engage instead of just those who are members of the various walled gardens and exclusive clubs that are the social media apps.

PS. I had my own 23rd blog-iversary of Parking Lot (the actual name of this blog) on September 6.