20 years of zerokspot

The date might not be completely accurate but on 2003-11-28 I wrote the first post for the site that would eventually become zerokspot.com, making this blog 20 years old 🥳 It’s weird to see a site evolve over the years. When it launched there was no Twitter or anything similar and so blogging as “early social media” also consisted of lots of link-posts. When other services showed up, I moved these mostly over there while reserving the blog for longer articles including technical tutorials and reviews.

The number of posts I managed to write also varied heavily over the years. Having a full-time job as opposed to being a student and also splitting content up between this site and various social media platforms led to a little dip that only got corrected after I had stumbled upon the whole IndieWeb movement and the POSSE practice. This also made me realise that my website should be one thing: It should be like a portfolio, presenting what I work on, what I care about, … what interests me.

Of course, there were moments when I thought it would be so much easier to just stick with sites like Twitter but, looking back, I’m extremely happy that I kept it! If nothing else, “modern” social media has shown that it’s just not reliable and I want to have a good place to archive all my public thinking, in whatever format I deem appropriate. Writing, in general, has always been something that allowed me to organise my thoughts about topics. Being able to share those thoughts with others, so that it might help them, has made the whole project that much more motivating! In recent months I, unfortunately, didn’t have the time to write too much technical & long-form but I hope this will change again in the future! I miss the days when I just jumped into a new frontend framework or library that I had stumbled upon and write a little tutorial out of my own experimentations. Those days will helpfully return again!

Another great aspect of this project has always been that I can just play around with it on a technical level. While the first couple of years saw a lot of changes on the frontend, after 2007 and with the move to Django, the backend changed drastically. In 2010 there was all of a sudden MongoDB and SOLR involved but there were also already the first components of file-based backend in place. The real switch to a static site generator (Hugo) happened in 2016 and I’ve sticked with it ever since. Commenting was first there, then moderated, then gone, and now I have webmentions (since 2020) and Mastodon-comments (since 2021). I’m not sure if this will stay that way as I miss the simplicity that good old comments provide. There are also tons of other IndieWeb topics (combined with the Fediverse) that I haven’t explored yet for this site. All I need is time (and not wasting it on playing video games 😅).

While I cannot promise another 20 years, I have enough ideas for at least some and I also don’t see the importance of having a personal website going away anytime soon. With the social media chaos and the increased commercialisation of the web, I think I will keep this little place for a little while longer 😅 Services like Twitter, Pownce (who still remembers it?), and App.net have come and gone but there is nothing like my own little online-home.

Thank you for reading this and if you’ve known about my little corner for the web for longer, thank you for coming back!