The first article I read in 2023 was this one: Bring back personal blogging. And it's interesting to me because every new year I debate whether or not I'm going to keep doing =waves arms= all this. The question has been especially wearing on me during the pandemic when I'm just not doing anything worth blogging about.

The article itself has some very good points though.

Social media, for all its popularity, simply doesn't have the community building that blogging did back in the day. I've made a lot of friends via blogging, and a handful of them are closer than many of my in-person friends. My guess is that this is because in-person friendships rely mostly on how often you see them, where blogging friendships rely mostly on how often you keep in contact with them. Even if you meet up with them in-person from time to time, your relationship goes beyond presence.

On April 18th, Blogography turns 20 years old.

Back in the day, I'd hold a week-long Blogiversary celebration with contests, new merchandise, and everything. Just look at this video from 2008 when the Grand Prize was me flying to wherever in the world the winner was so I could deliver prizes and have a party...

And so I did. I flew to St. Louis and had a great time!

I can't imagine doing anything like this now.

I mean, sure I still meet up with old-school bloggers from those early years. I met with one back in 2021, another in 2022, and will meet with another in March (proof positive that the article is right about the communities we built). But that's a far cry from all the "Dave Events" that used to happen... or even the larger gatherings like TequilaCon.

But it's this past community that still exists which makes blogging something I'm not quite ready to give up on yet.

So... here's to twenty years of blogging... and counting, I guess?

Wishing you and yours all the best in this New Year.

And... apparently my blog is borked again. I can update pages, but posts kinda fall into the void.

I used to use an app called "MarsEdit" which was a very nice composing tool. But it stopped working once the security on my blog changed because it doesn't support the required authentication now. I know that it was recently updated, but it doesn't look like the security was touched, so I started composing posts in WordPress directly. Problem is that WordPress doesn't like you to organize your own photos and wants to do that for you. I'm not a fan. This means I need to hand-code the photo HTML by hand. Also a pain in the ass.

AND THEN WORDPRESS EATS MY POST!

I wonder if it's a better option to compose the posts in MarsEdit and then copy/paste into WordPress? At least that way my posts wouldn't be lost if they didn't actually... you know... post.

=ponders-

Oh well. All that's going to have to take a back seat to fixing whatever is wrong with Blogography first.

The sad thing about the demise of blogs is that our online communities have been fractured.

Facebook is nice, but you can have friends half-way around the world living in the same city who don't even know that each other exists. Back when blogging was a thing, we'd regularly have meet-ups, and new friendships could be formed since everybody showed up to the same place and got to know each other in a social setting. There are days I miss blogging more than others (even though I'm still doing it)... and today is one of those days.