Apartment building hallway with a large pile of construction material.

If you’re extremely familiar with songwriter Bill Callahan, you might already have read the title of this post with the same delivery as in his song Writing. If not, that’s okay, but perhaps consider giving that quality piece of music a listen.

The last time I wrote a blog post was December 5th, 2012, which was, oh, only 13 years ago. It was also on a different website, which I’d be happy to link to if said website didn’t have a problematic SSL certificate. Even before that my earliest blogging was in 2000, a whopping 26 years ago at the time of writing this (and only a few years after the concept of a “blog” was defined). Suffice it to say that to write again now is to do so in a very different context. But with that new context comes a blank slate, as well as accumulated experiences and new motivations.

Choosing what to write about in a first post is a fair challenge, but I give myself some grace and don’t expect the highest quality without practice. In fact, that would seem to be the theme of my experience setting up this blog — while there’s much on the technical and design side that I’d still like to improve, I accept that “perfect is the enemy of done” and am happy to move on with it as it is. The photograph accompanying this post, chosen without too much deliberation from a batch I hope to share more of later, could be interpreted as a kind of representation of this “work in progress” mentality. Maybe just don’t read too much into the trash?

I do feel though that it might be best to pick one idea to focus on here, in order to have a point to this first post. So I’d like to touch briefly on the topic of expressing oneself on the internet — simply, a blog is still, after so many years since the format’s introduction, a great way to do it. The decision to write on your own website, eschewing the algorithmic surveillance capitalism of mass social media and centralized power of “walled garden” platforms, is one made with the full awareness that while you sacrifice some reach and influence, you gain ownership, independence, and the virtue of supporting the open internet.

That’s not to say a personal website and blog can’t be powerful communication tools. My hope is that by pairing my writing here with my mildly active posting on Mastodon (a strongly community-oriented approach to modern social media) I won’t be completely speaking into the void. Nonetheless, my motivation is less to have an impact and more to simply exercise my voice, a kind of power we shouldn’t underestimate.

So if you’re curious to read some of my future writing, which will be mostly design-focused, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Mastodon. Lastly, in the spirit of the open internet, I’d be remiss not to share some links that have been valuable references (discovered both long ago and only recently) while building this blog:

Thanks for reading, and happy new year.