This is the 2,677th post I’ve written in/on this blog, and it’s the last one. Well, probably, or as long as this Substack thing works out.
The first post published on this site was “A New Blog is Blogging,” back in 2003. The post is about moving my already created blog from a software I no longer remember called flipsource (which I ran on a desktop computer I was using as a server in my school office) to Blogger. I switched to Moveable Type (which I guess still exists) briefly but I’ve been using WordPress since about 2005. I’m going to keep using that here.
I actually sorta/kinda started blogging the year before that here in September 2002. As I wrote back then, I started my not a blog (just a static website, actually) as a way of updating/promoting an article I wrote which was published in the brand-new College Composition and Communication Online called “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites,” and also to write some things for a talk I was going to give in March 2003 at the CCCCs called ““Why Weblogs Should (and Shouldn’t) Count as Scholarship.” That was the first conference presentation I gave about blogging.
Also a tangent: “Where Do I List This on My CV?” was “disappeared” by NCTE when they gave up on the new online version of the journal after one issue and deleted my article from their servers. Here’s a blog post about that experience. I can’t remember if the Kairos editors reached out to me or if it was me to them, but they published a follow-up “Version 2.0” of the piece in 2007. NCTE tried again to do an all online version of the CCCs a few years later that was a disaster and ended after one issue, though that still is online. No one at NCTE or the CCCs editorial office has ever done anything to restore my disappeared article. Funny how that goes, huh?
Anyway, I’m not quitting blogging, but I am moving that part of things over to Substack. I’ll keep using this space as my homepage, perhaps as a “depository” for other web things, like my textbook (which I am going to update some day, maybe). I explain why in my first post completed on the Substack platform— the other posts are ones I imported from this site.
But the “at least for now” thing is real. Looking back at the origin story of my blogging reminds me that back in the day, I switched platforms and hosting services a couple of times before settling on WordPress. So who knows what will happen in the next couple years.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far, this site isn’t going away, and come see me at Substack.