I published this blog’s first post on 7 April 2014.¹ It’s mostly about the different tech stacks I considered and discarded before setting up the initial iteration of the blog on a pre-1.0 version of Ghost.² Writing that post, I hoped to continue writing additional posts and make the blog a regular habit. That I’m writing this ten years later means that I succeeded.

When I started this blog, I was in my final year of university, and today I’m a real adult and have been for quite some time. I’ve learnt a lot and even changed some opinions over that time, and this blog’s been a constant through all of it. I like to think that the writing has improved somewhat.

I also like to think the design is better now, or at least more memorable. This site launched with a Ghost version of the WordPress Landscape theme. In the early days, Ghost didn’t have a built-in navigation bar or next/previous post links, so I had to hack/add those in as the software was updated.

Sometime in 2016, I swapped Landscape out for a custom-written theme, largely because I could never find a site header image I was happy with.³ This initial theme did not represent a radical departure from Landscape – you can see what it looked like here.

No individual site design has been static – I tinker with them constantly. At some point after writing this custom theme, I started using boxes with post images for my next/previous post links, like the ones below.

I fell so in love with these boxes that I ended up designing a whole new theme around them in 2019. And that’s what this blog has been using ever since, with some minor touch-ups and a few additional features. It’s gotten some nice compliments from readers and I have yet to come up with something better.

As for actual posts, some years have been more fruitful than others. 2023 saw a good deal more posts than 2022,⁴ and 2024 is doing okay so far. I have never kept an explicit schedule for posting, nor has this blog ever had an official subject, and I intend to keep it that way. And so this blog will remain a repository for both painstakingly detailed tutorials assembled over months, rants slapped together in an hour or two and reviews of stuff I feel is worth reviewing (in any medium). Some posts might even be informative and/or amusing.

I also hope to unveil some new projects as well, and it’s probably about time I added something fresh to the fiction section. Apart from its primary blog function, this site serves as a great way to keep all that kind of stuff together.

The main subject of my last retrospective post was generative AI as it pertains to writing, a topic which has not declined in relevance over the last twelve months. I still agree with the perspective I put forward there, but I have a lot of other thoughts about this subject, which I’ve been stuffing into a draft post that is becoming unwieldy and will definitely need to be split into multiple pieces before it’s ready to share. The process of writing it will also help me discover what my thoughts ultimately actually are. Generative AI is well enough established and understood now that I feel comfortable making some pronouncements.

So here’s to the next decade of blogging. Thank you for reading.