I wrote a long post last year reflecting on the 15th anniversary of this website, but let it’s ‘Sweet Sixteen‘ last month pass by unremarked.
Still, this popped up this morning: 15 years at WordPress.com.
Looking at my archives, I must have registered my wordpress account, posted my first post a month later and then not touched it again for another two years. Too busy messing about on social media 😩. For a long time, my ‘website’ and my blog lived on separate URLs. I didn’t unify them until October 2019, by which point I’d already been back blogging weekly for 18 months.
Anyway, I wrote some reflections on blogging on the train back to London after Christmas—notes for my year-in-review post that I never got round to finishing. They feel worth sharing, so here they are.
What is a blog for in 2025?
As is tradition, I spent the train ride back from The Chalk re-reading all my previous year-end posts. Each year, I’m drawn to different themes. In the past, it’s been understated comments on my mental health or state of mind. But this year, something else stood out. Written another lifetime ago, back in 2012:
the last few years i have done an end of year roundup thing on twitter. but it’s been a bit of a crazy year, so i wanted to document it somewhere a bit more concrete.
But where are all those twitter thread those threads now? How would anyone even find them? If they aren’t useful now, were they ever useful? Beyond generating the easy satisfaction of a few likes and retweets? Those posts are still out there, buried in the geologic substrata of Twitter’s database. Uncurrent and, by the logic of the ‘now,’ unimportant.
When I was getting started here, I mostly used this blog to only post a New Year’s Eve list of all the things I’d done that year, things I was proud of, etc. Many of my friends and contemporaries did the same. That simple decision by my 27-year-old self means I’ve now captured 9 of the last 12 years of my life on this blog—a decision I’m incredibly grateful for.
From the vantage point of 2025, it’s clear that even in 2012 I was already questioning the utility of social media. “A blog is more concrete“, I said. It still is.
That post from 2012 might well be the genesis of a theme that’s occupied this site ever since: my relationship with social media and the broader internet.
Going even further back, I found this:
i kinda took a break from a lot of things last year up until relatively recently. that break included spending some time away from the internet. i started a few projects and had some cool ideas – for example i was toying with the idea of doing ‘some kind’ of podcast/audio essays in place of actually writing a blog.
You know, 2012 me—you were onto something. A podcast or audio essays that double as blog posts is a brilliant idea! You should just do it. Don’t wait six more years until 2018! But when you finally make it happen, you’ll call it Permanently Moved Online—because that’s exactly how you’ll feel: moved online and unsure what to do with yourself.
It’s funny to think that even in 2012, I was taking breaks from the internet and staying off Twitter. It really is the story of my life.
10 years ago, I was already asking the same thing that many are STILL asking:
What are Blogs for? Brings me onto a major current of discussion that has been running in back channels and freely over beers this year. That discussion of the state of social media and, feelings towards it and how does one engage with it.
In 2015: Some friends have gone ‘write only’, others read only, Some have repurposed seizable personal accounts towards publishing ventures and others have gone full sekret account and time warped back to 2008 twitter. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving over to tumblr and publishing everything out to twitter ‘write only’ style too but i’m still not sure.
2015 was a major inflection point. In my memory, it’s the last gasp of the old web that everyone is now nostalgic for. Blogs lived alongside social media platforms. People still clicked links. You could drive traffic to what you were building off platform.
But I also remember the conversations in the pub in late 2015: why bother with blogs at all? Traffic was already declining, and platforms were consuming more and more of people’s time. Why have a blog when you could just build an audience micro-blogging? I asked myself the same question.
Then two more years passed, and everything was already enshittifying. January 2018, I returned here. I’ve been posting every week since.
In 2025 a blog is…
A blog is an addressable surface.
A hyperdimensional topology.
Each post sits within a web of references, tags, dates, and links—forming a layered geography of thought over time. It’s not a timeline, though it does have a feed. It’s not linear, like a newsletter archive. It’s a landscape you can traverse: sideways, diagonally, backwards. Stumble into a post from 2017 and find it speaking to something happening now, or as the author you can fall down a rabbit hole of old tags and finds a version of yourself you’d forgotten.
The only person responsible for enshittifying this website is me.
It’s the last place online where I can be self-determined and still find readers.
This year (2024), a number of people have quietly put their blogs out to pasture and moved to Substack. Some found significant financial success there and let their old domains wither on the vine. Others had already stepped away, keeping their blog as a kind of outpost—a notification hub pointing elsewhere.
It’s understandable. Platforms offer built-in audiences, easier monetisation, and the dopamine hit of instant feedback. But there’s a trade-off: you’re building a presence on rented land. You’re publishing into someone else’s box.
A blog in 2025 should be a destination.
They don’t just distribute—they accumulate. They hold time, build presence and concretise thought.
A blog can be a body of work. A map of obsessions. A garden. A reliquary. A trapdoor. A field report from your corner of the internet. It’s not just a personal publishing platform—it’s personal infrastructure.
It’s also a place to feel embedded in a wider conversation—an invisible web of peers, and island in an archipelago of friends, and fellow travellers. A blog connects you to a lineage, a neighbourhood, a commons, even if the replies come years later.
And once you realise that, it becomes clear why I keep coming back.
This space for me hasn’t become just about sharing—it’s about staying.
For the love of blarg, start a blog.
Great! Now I can delete it from my drafts. Sweet sixteen and still here.
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