Today is the ten year anniversary of this blog. I thought I’d look back at the history of the blog and give some of my general thoughts about blogging.
Origins & Evolution
In 2008 I gave up my old static website that I had started four years earlier and created this blog using the Blogger platform. A blog seemed like the perfect answer to showcase and document projects I had in the works like my 50 State Comic and my 24 hour comic experiments. For the first couple of years of blogging I made myself post “something” every month but I eventually gave that up and only posted when I had some finished project to share.
In 2012 I switched to blogging using a self hosted WordPress site. The Blogger platform had worked perfectly fine for me, but I had been learning about WordPress and was itching to give it a try. In that redesign my portfolio page, which ran on Indexhibit, was the main landing page and the blog was an offshoot site of that. I also decided to change my domain name at this point too. This version of the site was not great overall, and consequently I did very little blogging during this period as well.
In 2017 I did a site redesign so both my portfolio and my blog ran on WordPress. I also changed my domain name back so it was simply my name. With the redesign I decided to start putting the illustrations I had been sharing on social media up on my blog as well. (I even backdated a bunch earlier this year.) I never had considered the social media illustrations “finished” work worthy of my blog, but I slowly changed my mind about this as they started taking more of my artistic focus.
About Blogging
Blogs are my favorite part of the internet. Period. I started reading blogs in the early aughts but they didn’t really click for me until I started to regularly use a RSS reader. Blogging doesn’t have the cultural cachet it had ten years ago as many users have turned to social media, but this doesn’t bother me much. Social media sites might have more users, but I feel the quality of the blogosphere more than makes up for any disparities between the two. Blogging is most certainly not dead.
My approach to blogging follows the POSSE acronym: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. My blog is the main repository and documentation for my work, but I can choose to publish my art elsewhere if I wish. This gives me some piece of mind that my work is in one place owned by me, even if other sites that host my work have issues or go away completely. It’s a bit of a hedge against the seemingly inevitable link rot that continues to fray the edges of the web.
Blogging is important to me not only as a public showcase of my work but also as a part of my artistic process. Putting down my thoughts about a piece helps me think more clearly about my art, and the tagging and search features can help sort through old work with ease. It definitely takes some maintenance, but I find it very satisfying to catalog and care for my art in this way. If you’re an artist or writer I would highly recommend blogging.