I’m currently involved in reading Say Everythingby Scott Rosenberg, an engaging account of the history of blogging. One of the interesting aspects of the book is its, uhm, history of blogging.In particular, it is impossible to exactly pin down the origin of blogging. The history of the web started with people just putting pages up online, including hyperlinks from one page to another. As someone built a website page by page, it would expand into a sprawling collection, a gradually growing and increasingly disorganized bunch of pages leading one to another. This made it rather difficult for users who had repeatedly visited a site to quickly find the new stuff.
I went through this stage early in my web life. At 16, on August 7, 2007, I went through the work of purchasing my own domain name at fontwords.com, along with a web hosting package from the cheapest company I could find. I did this so that I could have complete creative control of my own site–the freedom to build as many pages as I wanted, covering whatever topics I chose, and without any annoying ads, because I hate advertizing.
What first set me over the edge to plunk down my pizza-place money to go about building a website was a STEP library download from e-sword.net. This contained one hundred book titles, which contained copyright notice to an apparently non-existent company. Furthermore, one of the books was called Christian Living, and could be found nowhere on the internet, at the time. I had a really old copy of the book, and knew that this book, being written in 1892, was not subject to copyright claims, meaning that the non-existent company’s bogus copyright statement was keeping the excellent little gem of a book away from the public.
So using a copy I had, I constructed HTML files of Christian Living and put them up on line, in an idealistic resistence to the fake legal statements, for all to use. And I specifically made it unmistakeably clear to all readers that the book was freely available to be used in any way a visitor’s heart might desire.
Soon, I found all sorts of other things I wanted to share with the world, including a rather pungently theological anti-copyright essay. The stuff started piling up, and it became difficult to keep it all easily accessible and organized.
And as Scott Rosenberg said, all sorts of people were having trouble in the early days of HTML keeping everything in order. Chaos ensued for them and for me (although they got through this all about a decade before I did).
And so I started marking the latest stuff as “NEW.” Turns out, Scott Rosenberg noted that the same thing popped up spontaneously throughout the pre-blogging world. No single person started it; it was just a natural evolution of things.
And then, as even that began to fail me, I started keeping a list of the newest things on the homepage, which was a blog-like layout, constructed on a bloggish layout. And so I, like a great many people before me, invented a sort of blog made out of raw HTML code.
Had I not been so fiercely independent, I would have done a little research and discovered early on that there were free content-management systems like WordPress out there. Instead, I was out doing my anti-copying crazy Christian activist thing, reinventing blogging step by step.
I guess where I fell short was that I didn’t reinvent blogging software from scratch. The website was getting sloppy. I was experimenting constantly trying to index my site and provide links back and forth and proofread and whatnot, but nothing was working. And here the timing gets kind of fuzzy in my head.
At some point, I was introduced to the wonder of biblioblogging by means of Higgaion. It was thrilling! There was a guy who was persuing publicly and with an advanced educational degree, in a slick format, the sort of things my teenage mind was trying to sort through, textwise, in my sloppy little website.
I was instantly hooked. I kept going back and reading his posts, but sometimes it seemed like forever between his publishing them. And then I discovered the blogroll (later I was to find out this was standard on blogs). And this led to the great Ancient Hebrew Poetry.
I hopped from blog to blog, until I decided that I must get myself one of these. So I struggled through getting WordPress hooked up, and fontwords.com/blog began to exist as part of the website. I began posting regularly, and I quickly realized that it was way more convenient to wordpress an article than to create an HTML or PDF file. (By the way, I built my PDFs through OpenOffice, which is just one of the awesome things I discovered on my long and still-sort-of-going on anticopyright kick).
And so it came to pass that my blog was to increase that the rest of fontwords.com must decrease. I started taking down old articles I didn’t have much love for, or linking to them from pages on the blog, or replacing them with a blog article all together. The end result was that finally, about December 5 of 2009, the home page at fontwords.com had on it nothing but a single link to fontwords.com/blog.
And that’s when I realized that I should move the blog to be the sites homepage, lest I force people to repeatedly hav eto click through for no good reason. I messed that up and destroyed all my data, although I’ve got it all backed up but can’t import it. Anyhoo, this meant that fontwords.com restarted as a single blog post on December 6th, 2009. Ever since, this humble wordpress blog has been here.
It’s been two years, and now about three months and a total of about 155 posts. That’s the history of fontwords.com. And its future is yet to be written.
i invented blogging? a history of fontwords.com
I’m currently involved in reading Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg, an engaging account of the history of blogging. One of the interesting aspects of the book is its, uhm, history of blogging.In particular, it is impossible to exactly pin down the origin of blogging. The history of the web started with people just putting pages up online, including hyperlinks from one page to another. As someone built a website page by page, it would expand into a sprawling collection, a gradually growing and increasingly disorganized bunch of pages leading one to another. This made it rather difficult for users who had repeatedly visited a site to quickly find the new stuff.
I went through this stage early in my web life. At 16, on August 7, 2007, I went through the work of purchasing my own domain name at fontwords.com, along with a web hosting package from the cheapest company I could find. I did this so that I could have complete creative control of my own site–the freedom to build as many pages as I wanted, covering whatever topics I chose, and without any annoying ads, because I hate advertizing.
What first set me over the edge to plunk down my pizza-place money to go about building a website was a STEP library download from e-sword.net. This contained one hundred book titles, which contained copyright notice to an apparently non-existent company. Furthermore, one of the books was called Christian Living, and could be found nowhere on the internet, at the time. I had a really old copy of the book, and knew that this book, being written in 1892, was not subject to copyright claims, meaning that the non-existent company’s bogus copyright statement was keeping the excellent little gem of a book away from the public.
So using a copy I had, I constructed HTML files of Christian Living and put them up on line, in an idealistic resistence to the fake legal statements, for all to use. And I specifically made it unmistakeably clear to all readers that the book was freely available to be used in any way a visitor’s heart might desire.
Soon, I found all sorts of other things I wanted to share with the world, including a rather pungently theological anti-copyright essay. The stuff started piling up, and it became difficult to keep it all easily accessible and organized.
And as Scott Rosenberg said, all sorts of people were having trouble in the early days of HTML keeping everything in order. Chaos ensued for them and for me (although they got through this all about a decade before I did).
And so I started marking the latest stuff as “NEW.” Turns out, Scott Rosenberg noted that the same thing popped up spontaneously throughout the pre-blogging world. No single person started it; it was just a natural evolution of things.
And then, as even that began to fail me, I started keeping a list of the newest things on the homepage, which was a blog-like layout, constructed on a bloggish layout. And so I, like a great many people before me, invented a sort of blog made out of raw HTML code.
Had I not been so fiercely independent, I would have done a little research and discovered early on that there were free content-management systems like WordPress out there. Instead, I was out doing my anti-copying crazy Christian activist thing, reinventing blogging step by step.
I guess where I fell short was that I didn’t reinvent blogging software from scratch. The website was getting sloppy. I was experimenting constantly trying to index my site and provide links back and forth and proofread and whatnot, but nothing was working. And here the timing gets kind of fuzzy in my head.
At some point, I was introduced to the wonder of biblioblogging by means of Higgaion. It was thrilling! There was a guy who was persuing publicly and with an advanced educational degree, in a slick format, the sort of things my teenage mind was trying to sort through, textwise, in my sloppy little website.
I was instantly hooked. I kept going back and reading his posts, but sometimes it seemed like forever between his publishing them. And then I discovered the blogroll (later I was to find out this was standard on blogs). And this led to the great Ancient Hebrew Poetry.
I hopped from blog to blog, until I decided that I must get myself one of these. So I struggled through getting WordPress hooked up, and fontwords.com/blog began to exist as part of the website. I began posting regularly, and I quickly realized that it was way more convenient to wordpress an article than to create an HTML or PDF file. (By the way, I built my PDFs through OpenOffice, which is just one of the awesome things I discovered on my long and still-sort-of-going on anticopyright kick).
And so it came to pass that my blog was to increase that the rest of fontwords.com must decrease. I started taking down old articles I didn’t have much love for, or linking to them from pages on the blog, or replacing them with a blog article all together. The end result was that finally, about December 5 of 2009, the home page at fontwords.com had on it nothing but a single link to fontwords.com/blog.
And that’s when I realized that I should move the blog to be the sites homepage, lest I force people to repeatedly hav eto click through for no good reason. I messed that up and destroyed all my data, although I’ve got it all backed up but can’t import it. Anyhoo, this meant that fontwords.com restarted as a single blog post on December 6th, 2009. Ever since, this humble wordpress blog has been here.
It’s been two years, and now about three months and a total of about 155 posts. That’s the history of fontwords.com. And its future is yet to be written.