Not A Blog

As Joel Hooks famously stated this website “…is a digital garden, not a blog”. My reasons for that are my own, though they may have some wider applicability, given how much heat there has been over the last few years around different (older) ways to organize a personal website.

I have been writing things on the internet since the early 1990s. I had websites on GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire (at one point I had a site on each of them simultaneously). I was a spacer GIF ninja, a webring maven, a recepient of both Cool Site of the Day and a listing on The Useless Pages.

Some of my web-based projects have been actually useful to other people. I created the first database of pipe tobacco reviews and helped spawn a (very very) small renaissance in a (very very) niche hobby. I helped catalog all of the great old pubs (and a lot of the scary flat-roof pubs) of east London in the years before the Olympics made so much so generic.Unfortunately, both the website and the database containing these pub profiles was lost in the decade between when I started cataloging them and when Historic England put out their call for contributions to their project to document postwar pubs. As a matter of fact, it was that East London pub project that was the first thing I put on the web (circa 2005) that was built in a CMS A Content Management System stores content in predefined database fields and generates pages when they are requested by a site visitor. .