So today is my twentieth anniversary of blogging under The Dignified Rant banner.
I started on Geocities on July 12, 2002. Which eventually became Yahoo!Geocities. My blogfather was James Lileks, who celebrated 25 years of The Bleat this year. I planned numerous categories of writing subjects, from foreign policy to home life. I wondered if I could manage to update it once a week.
Hah!
Originally I didn't even have hyperlinks. I had main subject pages with archives pages behind them. I moved an article off the main page as I added new material. And when I did add hyperlinks after I started to get links from Instapundit, it was a complicated process of double posting to the main subject page and the subject page archives. The hyperlink went to the archives duplicate. Eventually I'd delete the main page version.
It was the digital equivalent of a wax tablet. Held together by duct tape.
Then I moved national security-related posts to Blogger. And then moved everything when Yahoo!Geocities was shut down. I eventually managed to salvage my old archives after Yahoo!Geocities went under.
Yay. Future historians rejoice.
I tried to mine TDR for compilations of posts on subjects. I only did one and it was too much work for the effort. I don't have a tip jar but if you want to support my work, feel free to buy my one and only product in that series. It's here. Buy it often if you want! I freely admit the formatting is crappy. I didn't know what I didn't know. But it looked great on my screen before I uploaded it. And I'm not going to reformat it. But it is an interesting topic if an old take on the subject.
But I will say that writing the blog kept me learning. And occasionally I
turned topics I blogged about into published articles.
My posting went up over the years, especially after I moved to the Blogger platform. Eventually, I felt I had to limit my posting. It seemed excessive, even to me. As time went on, I moved from limiting myself to 3 posts per day, to 2 posts, and now 1 post. This forced me to suppress the impulse to immediately blog about an event lest the world not see my immediate take on the issue.
I'm much better, now.
Indeed, I'm generally posting one or two weeks ahead. That's pre-Internet speed.
As my children got older, I stopped blogging about each in turn. On the original site I added coding to prevent search sites from indexing those posts. My compromise once on Blogger was to stop blogging when they each got to the age when I figured it would be social suicide to have posts about them online. I never mentioned them by name, at least. So now I hardly mention them. But they grew up over the time of this blog from wonderful children to fine young adults. And I have a record separate from boxes or digital files of pictures with no dates to place them in time.
Blog traffic started very low. I can still remember being happy to have at least one page view each day of a month! Over time, traffic went up to reach 100 per day. But it was a slow slog without ever really skyrocketing.
And then the Blog Die Off happened.
Twitter's sweet meteor of death and social media in general crushed the blogosphere. My traffic, which fell by about 80% by the time I hit bottom, was no exception. Last year traffic recovered substantially. I don't know why. But I'm still not anywhere near pre-Twitter levels. We'll see if I can maintain that momentum.
I contemplated adding Twitter and social media to bolster TDR, but ultimately could not bear to enter that cesspool of intolerance. I don't regret that.
I've tried hard to post with integrity. I have my views on politics. Which are mostly pretty obvious. But I can set that aside to comment on the national security issues of the day. I may be wrong on an issue, but I base my analysis on my education, experience, and ability to synthesize information from different sources. Don't expect me to be a cheerleader. You won't find my positions on issues changing to support "my" party in power. I've offered honest takes. Sometimes I find older posts that approach a topic from the same angle despite changes in the people on top.
I have never allowed post comments. You can check out my sources and methods section if you want to know why.
Here are twenty posts over the last twenty years, chosen from page views and other factors, in no particular order:
- Ready. Set. Go.
- Avert Your Eyes Puny Mortals!
- Guiding the Objective Force Through a Desert Storm.
- Anbar Anvil. I actually got an email from a Marine officer in Anbar province who was pleased that I understood what was going on with the Iraq surge offensive in Anbar. I was heartened by that.
- Getting What We Deserve.
- That's Their Story and They're Sticking To It.
- You Didn't Lift That.
- Collateral Damage.
- When the Ford Was Still a Blueprint.
- The Spartans At Least Had 300.
- Readiness Defined.
- Great. More Housing Vacancies.
- Um, Remember Pearl Harbor?
- Woke Lips Sink Ships.
- And Now For Something Completely Different.
- Vengeance.
- Catch-1619.
- Smells Like Woke Spirit.
- Spongespine Spandexpants.
- They Can Always Just Eat More Pie.
Although this excludes pre-Blogger posts. I don't have statistics on them and most are just in mass monthly "posts" after I recovered them. Tragic, I know.
I'm still not suffering from solo blogger burnout. I have grown weary at times. So far I get over that soon enough. But I have adjusted my content over the years. Perhaps that is the key.
So there you go. This got longer than I intended. But it is a twenty-year retrospective! And now you know what my former students put up with and what my children endured when they asked me a history question.
Thanks for reading! We'll see how long I keep this going. I honestly never thought I'd be going this long.
UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for helping the celebration along (although yes, I did send word to Vodkapundit about the glorious event). Which is nice given that Instapundit first linked an entry even before I had hyperlinks.
NOTE: War coverage continues here.
