This domain turns 25-years-old this year.
The act of blogging has changed a lot over that same amount of time. At least for me, the advent of microblogging dampened and then outright killed my willingness to write longer-form content. And if I did want to write something longer, I’d make a thread… on the microblogging site. I did all this knowing that avalonstar.com sat here collecting dust, waiting for an opportunity to house my thoughts like it had done for more than a decade.
The Nostalgia Bug
I tell my community, The Crusaders, that nostalgia is my weakness. If you’ve known me for any amount of time, walked into my stream, and presented me with a fond memory, you’d instantly derail me. It’s super effective, as they say. The fact is, I’ve always enjoyed personal, experiential nostalgia. I see it as the other side of the ambition coin. Ambition requires measurement of some kind. You have to know where you’ve been to not only know where you’re going, but know how far you traveled to get there.
The entire revival of avalonstar.com in this particular style is a direct result of what a personal site this old should represent.
To be fair, this is a “first-world problem” in a way that not a lot of people even have personal sites that are as old or have as much affinity for as I do with this place. Some see blogging as simply a way to exhale their thoughts onto a screen, or to provide value through spreading knowledge. There is no existential step above that. It serves its utility, and if you picked a stable hosting provider, it would stand the test of time as a place that housed your thoughts.
But it’d be one of many such houses. Twitter, Reddit, even Discord and LinkedIn are places that can house pieces of you: their user experiences crafting what category of thought you’d leave there. Services like Medium with “baked-in” audiences and monetary support mechanisms fought to centralize long-form thought. There were times where I thought there were better places to post, or I had outgrown this place as a blog. No matter what the reasoning, the effect was that avalonstar.com kept getting shoved down the flow chart of “where do I post this thought”?
The Stratospheric View
Humor me for a bit and take that existential step with me. What if we did zoom out a bit more? If you were fortunate enough or determined enough to gather all of your thoughts in one place, and then you zoomed out: what does that represent?
It’s a chronicle of your life.
A blog that’s stood for upwards of quarter-century becomes more than just a series of posts. It’s a snapshot of who you were at the time you wrote it. (It’s not just blogs either, take a look an exported snapshot of 120-character posts: it’s a time capsule.) It’s fun, albeit a bit embarrassing sometimes, to travel back to old posts and remember what state of mind you were in, how far you’ve traveled, and honestly, how much freer we were breathing the fresh air of a younger Internet.
The thing about all of this though is that blogs and even micro posts lack context. They lack the context of how old you were, where you lived, what did for a living, all things that would have had an effect on your state of mind. All of these things can be determined, but it takes work. I’m willing to divulge this information because it exists to support the stories I tell. And it is here that I circle back to the title of this post, what this blog represents.
What This Blog Represents
My aim with this 35th (or so) version of Avalonstar was two fold:
- I wanted to move avalonstar.com up the list of possible places to post my thoughts, and re-create the conditions that allowed me to write so freely in the past. I’ll address this in a future post.
- Provide meaningful context for each post by adding points of reference.
I’ve considered this context to be of primary importance to the site’s future direction. For example you happened to scroll all the way down the new timeline view and click on my first few posts, you’ll be able to see that I was 21 years old and in college. A few posts below this one? I was closing a startup at the age of 38. At 21, I was working on my entrepreneurship major, and 17 years later I managed to keep a startup going for 2 years. It speaks to what we’ve been talking about.
A Work in Progress
Before finally putting the proverbial pen to paper on this version of avalonstar.com, I took a lot of time to think over how best to commemorate a place that has been with me for the majority of my life. In this respect, the theme of giving every entry context along with my seemingly natural tendency to like timelines led to the design you have in front of you.
While this current iteration is stuck in the latter half of the 80/20 rule—the remaining 20% polish taking 80% of the time—it’s natural for this site to be in some sort of flux after release. I’ve been taking the time, for instance, to start writing descriptions for all my posts that didn’t have one. What started out as just an exercise to make the timeline feel a bit more alive as you scrolled down turned into a stark reminder that time is a flat circle.
This also doesn’t feel like the greatest return post, but those are cobwebs that are meant to be cleared with time. All of this just serves to provide context for future me (and future you, or I guess now you) to look upon.