my pointless history of putting things on the internet
I've been putting things out on the internet for a while.
old tech blogs circa 2010-2012
I was a child. I wrote articles about technology news (and reviewed whatever old used phone I had, posted them on youtube and x-posted to these blogs).
I used "website builder"/blogging platforms to post them, because that's the most my 10 year old brain could comprehend and use. I vaguely remember some names. There was no sense of organisation:
- Jimdo (1 blog)
- yolasite (1 blog, shortly abandoned)
- blogspot (2 blogs?)
There's no archive or public record of these.
youtube channel (2008-2016)
I used to review old phones and other random gadgets in the house and post them on YouTube.
Initially they were scrappy videos recorded on a handycam. I used to get racist comments from people like "apu's child lololol". I didn't care though.
In between I tried "let's play" videos. Then I tried some tech news roundup things.
Towards the end I had some decent video editing and production value (the videos were shot on a DSLR, some audio and visual effects as well). They became less around gadget reviews and more about technology itself.
I had monetised this back when it was easy to do on YouTube and earned something like $60 dollars off this channel.
jekyll static site (2018-2019)
As I was getting more comfortable with programming, I started a GitHub pages website with a popular jekyll template. I honestly don't remember what I posted on this. But I think there was one "meta" post after which this site was shortly abandoned.
hugo static site (2019-???)
I moved to Hugo, a different static site generator. I had one post on it which I vaguely recall being an in-depth trashing of OpenForge, which was pitched as a place to host open source indian government software projects.
jekyll college club static site (2019-2020)
I also created a static communal blog site for an open source college club I was running. This had a couple of programming blogs. I had written a fairly large one about floating points which was probably my high point with it.
instagram art page (2019)
I also had an art page on instagram where I posted extremely bizarre digital art.
weird art youtube channel (2019-)
I also made a lot of weird surreal videos on a new YouTube channel. They were existential and dreamlike.
I made some music on LMMS and garageband in this period and posted them as "EPs" on this channel. It was also noisy and surreal music. If I had to name the genre, it would be "gutkhacore".
racket + clojure "living notebook" (2020-2022)
At this point, my blog setups were getting crazier and more esoteric. I had just discovered Matthew Butterick's typography online books, and was learning Racket/Lisp generally, so it was natural that I use his library to create something like a "living notebook" which was a mix of essays.
The notable thing about this was that this site had a lot of custom handcrafted CSS, custom markup language (power of Racket!), and a codebase that was a mix of Racket and Clojure—the latter was mixed into this because I wanted a cool live visual animation thing on my homepage for no reason.
This setup made it painful to publish, and so only 3-4 essays were ever posted on it. But my writing was a lot better by then.
GSoC weeknote static site (2020)
I had a separate static site to write down my GSoC work for Git to separate it from my beautiful and pristine living notebook.
email to blogs static blog (2022-2023)
My brother once created a service (called internetblog.co) where I could send email to a URL, and it would publish my email (with formatting and images preserved) as a blog on my internetblog URL. I was initially skeptical because I didn't expect it to last long. He promised me he'd support it even if there were no other users so I started using it (spoilers: he did not support it forever).
But this platform was quite low friction and unlocked a prolificity to my writing not found earlier. I was suddenly posting 2-3 posts a month, and the quantity was quite satisfying. I remember having around 50 drafts in my inbox, and I'd come back to some of them piecemeal until it was "complete enough" and hit post. This was also intended as a "secondary" blog so I wasn't to worried about perfection and quality, which was needed for my beautiful living notebook.
The combination of this email-to-blog convenience juxtaposed against my dying living notebook made me realise that reducing friction to post (rather than being bespoke) was highly important to my writing.
writefreely blog (2023-2024)
After my brother rugpulled me by taking down the email-to-blog service, I evaluated other options.
Writefreely stood out, as it had a nice and simple web editor and admin page. My "secondary blog" posting spree continued on this. But there was still a lot of friction to post anything with images in it.
this site (2024-present)
I finally decided to kill my "living notebook" because it was dead, and bring in my "secondary blog" posts and some other older posts into a singular place. Which is this site. This is hosted on Ghost, which is low-friction; and it's easy to put images.
other other youtube channel (2024-present)
I post short POV videos exploring thindi joints around Bangalore, shot on my Meta Ray Bans. It needed a space separate from my old tech channel and the less old art channel
There's 2 videos on it, and 10+ in the pipeline that maybe I'll get around to publishing some day.
anonymous substack
I also had an anonymous substack. I posted once on it, before shortly realising that I have no interest in publishing anonymously.
I might have missed something
Honestly, there's been so much I've put out on the internet that I am likely to have missed out on something.
concluding thoughts
Nothing to conclude. I don't have any inspirational soundbite to give you. I have just been writing and publishing things because that feels like the natural order of things for me. It can look messy, and the path can be arduous or something. good luck have fun
Posted because Jatan from IndieWebClub wanted to read about this.
