links for 2007-01-11
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I have a birthday coming up. I'm just saying.
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Apocalyptic
I saw peanut butter magnet man again this morning. He looked determined.
Today's probably like the third really cold day we've had this winter. I am estimating this based on the amount of cat hair that has accumulated on my winter coat so far: it's not all that much, because I have been wearing hoodies and jackets instead. And over the weekend I wore a t-shirt because it was seventy fucking degrees.
I am pretty sure the rapture is coming, and soon.
Etc
I think one of my favorite things about living in New York during the winter is that it's still pitch dark when I wake up in the morning. I like watching our living room view of Manhattan and the river go from night to sunrise while I have my first cup of coffee before work.
Me, Me, Me
A few weeks ago I was approached by my friend Margaret for an interview. She's writing an article on the early days of blogging - as in, that misty prehistoric era of A Few Years Ago. As it's likely that only a couple of snippets of this interview will appear in the finished piece, she suggested I might want to post it in its entirety. I suppose if there is anyone in the world interested in reading this sort of thing, it would be you poor misguided souls who already read my site. So here you are.
MG: So let's start with the basics. Tell me a little about yourself and how you came to have a weblog.
ES: Let's see. I'm a web developer in my mid-twenties and I live in New York City. But when I first started posting things on the Internet, I would have been a high school kid living with my parents, in Massachusetts. I guess it's important to note that my site was not originally a weblog. It was just a few photos I had taken, some really horrendous things I had written, and links to sites I liked. This was late 1998 or very early 1999, and while there were certainly people blogging already, it wasn't something I was aware of. I guess I just thought of my site as a homepage - a glorified profile, in the AOL or Yahoo sense. If I had been in high school when Myspace existed, I suppose I would have been really into that instead, as much as it makes me cringe to say so.
MG: When did your site become something you'd call a weblog?
ES: Sometime in late 1999 or 2000, I started adding daily content that was sort of journal-like. I didn't archive any of this at first. That was partially because I wrote the site myself from scratch and the easiest thing to do was just keep editing the same file over and over, but even if I'd been aware of some kind of weblog software I probably wouldn't have used it. It seemed like inherently ephemeral content - I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to read today what my day had been like last week. And I thought of it as just one section of my site. It seemed like an easy way to add content and keep people coming back, but the bulk of the site was still photos and longer written pieces.
MG: Let's talk about your desire to keep people coming back. What was the audience you had in mind for your blog?
ES: Just my friends, really. People I knew from high school, and also from IRC and Usenet. I'm not sure why I wanted them to come back to the site more than once. Vanity, I suppose.
MG: By the time I first encountered your site, you were something of a blogging superstar. You had huge amounts of traffic, you were involved in all kinds of high-profile projects, people were sending you money and gifts and buying t-shirts with your logo on them. How did you go from just keeping a homepage for your friends to having that kind of visibility?
ES: I think there were a couple of factors. One of them, I'm sure, was the fact that I was a young, single female with an interesting lifestyle revealing fairly personal details about herself on the Internet on a daily basis. In retrospect, that seems kind of obvious. And at the time I was certainly aware that a chunk of the attention I was getting was creepy or otherwise undesirable. But certainly not all of it. The other big factor was my brief connection to Penny Arcade.
MG: Penny Arcade being the massively popular webcomic, for those who aren't familiar with it.
ES: Right.
MG: How did you come to be involved in PA?
ES: I was just a fan, really. I sent some email to Jerry Holkins and he, being infinitely more polite than myself, actually replied. We became friends, and eventually he asked if I'd be interested in redesigning the site. He'd been doing it himself up till then, and I don't think he'd disagree that he's a much better writer than he is a web developer. So I redesigned the site in either 2000 or 2001, and by then it was pretty popular so my involvement got me a lot of new readers. I redesigned it again a year or two later and got another surge of traffic. But that's really the extent of it, I've never been involved in the day to day running of the site.
MG: Do you still work with PA at all?
ES: No. But I'm still a big fan, and I find it hugely heartening to see people dear to me succeed at something they love and are good at.
MG: So by the time that all of this was happening, would you say your site was definitely a weblog?
ES: Yes, I think so. I had started archiving the daily posts and it was certainly the only reason anyone visited the site. I guess there were also a lot of photos of me with strange hair.
MG: Let's fast-forward a little bit. Would you say your site is roughly as popular as it was in 2000 - 2002?
ES: No, much less so.
MG: Why do you suppose that is?
ES: I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is that I essentially abandoned the site for nearly a year. There were a few posts here and there, but there was no longer any real reason for people to visit every day, so they didn't, and consequently forgot about it entirely. I also ceased doing other things that might bring in readers, like redesigning other well-known sites.
MG: Were you just not interested in doing those things anymore?
ES: I was never really interested in the notion of being a web celebrity. But it's certainly true that I was less focused on maintaining and improving my site - my priorities were just different. I graduated from college and got my first real job during that period, so the amount of free time I'd had before just evaporated. No more four day weeks, no more four month vacations.
There's also the fact I moved in with my boyfriend. He certainly wasn't a negative influence on my desire to keep a weblog - far from it, actually. His encouragement is probably the only reason I didn't abandon the site altogether. But when I had him to come home to every day, I suddenly had someone to tell all my stories to. Instead of posting on my site how my day was, I'd just talk about it with him, and that sort of fulfilled whatever need I had to share the tiny details of my life with other people.
MG: That's really interesting. But I notice you didn't stop posting altogether, and it seems like you're still with your boyfriend, is that correct?
ES: Yes, Chris and I still live together. But I've made an effort to get back in the habit of writing for the web. We'll see how that works out, I guess.
MG: People often say that the "A-list bloggers" are just the people who got into it first. But you've been blogging longer than many of those folks, and yet by your own assessment your site isn't as big as it used to be. Do you have any thoughts on why that is?
ES: Sure. One of the reasons, I think, is that a lot of the people who've been blogging for a long time have shifted from personal blogging to topic-oriented blogging. Megnut is a good example - her weblog is a food blog now. I think a topic-oriented blog will always have a wider and more lasting appeal than a personal blog of roughly the same caliber, and that's probably as it should be. But of course that isn't the whole answer, because there are some personal blogs that are wildly successful. I'm thinking here of sites like Dooce. Heather's blog is intensely personal, but she has a unique combination of enthusiasm, dedication, and a wonderful talent for comedy that makes her blog work better than most others. She is certainly a better and more prolific writer than I am, so the fact that she has more readers than I do is only natural.
MG: How do you feel about the state of blogging at the end of 2006?
ES: I'm not sure that I have a position on the state of blogging in general. But there's an abundance of great sites that I read regularly, that's for sure.
MG: What's next for you? Do I understand correctly that you're involved in Slashdot now?
ES: No, I'm not. I've written a few book reviews for Slashdot, and I hope to write more in the future, but I think you're thinking of my boyfriend Chris. He works for OSTG and is Slashdot's DBA.
MG: Well, thanks for your time. Keep blogging!
ES: Thanks.
Lost in our living room
Because there is something wrong with my brain, I enjoy organizing things more than I should. I spent a chunk of this morning digging through dusty stacks of DVDs and video games and sorting everything out to my satisfaction. Or almost - this is yet another area in which we're sorely lacking the necessary storage. But I did uncover a bunch of movies I'd forgotten we owned, so the afternoon was spent munching on Tomato Pretz and watching Lost in Translation. Then later it was pizza and Hackers, because who doesn't love those mischevous scamps, with their spray-painted laptops and Rollerblades?
When people run in circles
Chris and I watched the director's cut of Donnie Darko
Whatever the reason, never let it be said that I don't relish an opportunity to tell the CMOAT to go suck a fuck.
It turns out I like catfish
I work in lower Manhattan, so the abundance of places from which to order or otherwise acquire lunch is pretty staggering. Places in the Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo will all deliver to my building. Nevertheless, I have a few definite favorites, and of these San Loco is somewhere near the top. It's cheap, tasty Mexican food - but not fast food Mexican like you get at those places which also serve Chinese food. (Shudder.)
Anyhow, I have a bad habit of finding one or two things I like at a restaurant and ordering them until I'm so sick to death of them that I can't eat at those places again for a long time. Realizing that all I ever get at San Loco is the chipotle chicken nachos, I thought I would try something wildly different. The result? The catfish queso loco, which is a catfish hard-shell taco wrapped in a soft tortilla with a layer of melted cheese in between. It was exquisite, and you'll notice I managed to get two paragraphs into a post about fish tacos without making any really bad puns. I hope you appreciate the effort that this entailed.
Ahem
It's well past Christmas now, and there have been two total days this winter that have required a coat, at least in New York City. Today it was 58°, and tomorrow it will be 62°. That's right: it's still hoodie weather in the first week of January. I am not complaining - merely observing. And possibly buying more hoodies.
Please to enjoy this thread about strangely addressed items that were successfully mailed.
links for 2007-01-04
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I guess it really has been fourteen years.
links for 2007-01-03
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This was on MetaFilter a while back, but I only just got around to reading it all the way through - it's a fascinating and extremely well-researched article. It also made me hungry.
