As someone who has been involved with the Internet for more than 30 years, who can remember how it felt the first time my modem connected me not just to the little world of America Online but to the entire world (at least the parts that were online, fewer in those days), I definitely feel like a geezer when I complain about what it's become.
I've been on some social platforms for more years than my kids have been alive, and I still sign up to almost every new one I hear about just in case it becomes the next big one. But I can also see how it has not been the best thing for society to give everyone a platform to share their thoughts. That sounds elitist, but one of the beautiful parts about the early Internet was that while it provided everyone with a platform, it took some effort to get your words online and more effort to get people to look at them.
I've published a number of blogs over the years. You can find them if you poke around the Internet Archive. But apart from the earliest days, around 2000-2004, it was pretty dead. In those days, there were a few of us providing updates. These were coworkers and friends, and we worked for Vegas.com, so being constantly online was our natural state.
These were also the years when less than 20 percent of Americans had high-speed Internet access at home. So having a job that came with high-speed access certainly made it easier.
This is also in the days before widespread Wi-Fi (mid-200s), the iPhone (launched in 2007) or the iPad (2010). You had to sit at a desktop and be somewhat intentional to get your thoughts online.
There were platforms like Blogger, MySpace and others, but if you wanted your own domain name or hosting, it was still somewhat technical.
For this latest iteration of Pre2k, I used Claude to walk me through the steps. Still a little technical since I self-host, but so many open-source tools exist to run things once you have a place for them to live. I'm using Ghost CMS, which is intuitive and outstanding. When I built a searchable index of the 1985-1989 issues of my college newspaper the Sagebrush, there were tons of free solutions to resize images, provide thumbnail viewers, generate clippings of articles, everything.
All of this reminds me of my crafting hobby. I have a Cricut, a little letterpress and a few other devices that make crafting fun and much easier than doing everything by hand. I have lots of materials and the Internet is loaded with helpful videos on how to create almost anything.
But it all comes back to actually doing something with all of this stuff. I've had the ability to publish my thoughts on the Internet for almost 30 years, but it's still hard to sit down and do something. There are a few blogs I've followed for those decades, and I marvel at the effort and discipline of the ones that are still going.
I have hundreds of saved recipes (my new favorite trick for Mac users: copy the URL and paste it into the Freeform app, where a nice little tile is generated). I have every art supply and the tools to use them. I've heard people say how there are three stages to hobbies (and actually a lot of activities). A post on the Chasing 10K blog nailed the phases: Maximum Enthusiasm, Random Flailing and the Long, Slow Grind.
We'll see!
