Egad. Contra turned 20 when I wasn't looking. Actually, I was
looking. What I wasn't doing was breathing. Enough. At
night.
I think I have a handle on that problerm now, and with
any luck at all I'll be writing more of everything going forward.
I'm 50,000 words into my new novel Dreamhealer, and
tinkering the last bits of my free ebook FreePascal From Square
One. There's much to be done, now that my energy is starting
to come back.
The anniversary was this past June 5. On June 5, 1998, the very
first entry in Jeff Duntemann's VDM Diary went up on the Coriolis
Web server. That first entry was nothing grandiose. I didn't have
permalinks on those early entries, so I'll quote it here in its
entirety:
Spent most of this past week in Chicago at Book Expo America,
and saw two remarkable "book on demand" operations of interest to
small software developers. Both IBM and Xerox have developed super
hi-res, high-speed laser printers that print on continuous roll
paper, almost like miniature offset printing presses. Both firms
have set up subsidiaries to act as service bureaus, capable of
producing high-quality perfect-bound books with glossy four-color
covers, quantity one, at a unit price of between $2 and $4,
depending on the size of the book. They're targeting the service at
small press, and to keep low-volume books from going out of print
entirely. But you and I know the real application here is going to
be software documentation for small developers, especially
shareware developers whose volumes are smallish and unpredictable.
Go take a look: IBM and Ingram's partnership LightningPrint is at
www.lightningprint.com.
Those early entries didn't have titles, and were not the
long-form essays that evolved over time, but instead short, newsy
items much like I later came to publish as Odd Lots.
For those who didn't know me back then, "VDM" was our (carefully
chosen) acronym for Visual Developer Magazine, published
by The Coriolis Group from 1990-2000. By 2000 most of our energy
went into books. The magazine, in competition with increasingly
sophisticated (and free) Web pages, ceased to be viable toward the
end of 1999. The March/April 2000 issue was the last, and VDM Diary
closed down with Visual Developer itself.
By that time, however, I was hooked. On July 25, 2000, I created
Contrapositive Diary on my own Web hosting space, where it's been
ever since.
So let's go back to Contra's secret origins. Without realizing
it (and years before that truly ugly word came to prominence) I had
invented blogging. Now, others invented it as well. There is such a
thing as independent invention, and in truth the idea seems kind of
obvious to me. I'm not sure Slashdot is a blog (I've always
considered it a news site) but it launched in the fall of 1997,
though I don't remember seeing it until a couple of years later.
Justin Hall is almost certainly the first blogger in
the sense that we use the word today, having invented the concept
back in 1994. Still further back in time, I remember reading a
periodic (weekly?) posting on Usenet from Moonwatcher, a chap who
posted about the phases of the Moon, eclipses, meteor showers,
visible planets, and other things relating to astronomy. This was
in 1981 or thereabouts, when I worked at Xerox and had a login to
ARPANet. So yeah, it's an old idea, and an obvious one.
Still, I think of it as the best idea I never had.
Huh? It's true: Contra was someone else's idea. My ad sales rep
for VDM was Lisa Marie Hafeli, and in the spring of 1998 she
approached me with a request: Find a way to publish something short
online every day, or close to it. What she wanted was more product
mentions, which helped her sell ads to industry firms. I wasn't
entirely sure that such a thing would work as an ad sales tool, but
the notion of a daily diary online intrigued me. It took until June
to get to the top of my stack. At the time I wasn't in direct
control of our Web presence, so (almost) every day before I went
home from work I emailed the text to my webmaster Dave, and he
added it to the tail end of the HTML file stored on our Web
server.
I didn't post every day, and not every post was a product
mention, but the vehicle proved popular with our readers. I wasn't
surprised over the next couple of years when others did the same
thing. As I said, it's a pretty obvious idea. What did
surprise me was the scope of its adoption. By the time the company
itself shut down in the spring of 2002, the word "blog" had been
coined, and blogs were all over the place.
I edited the HTML files by hand as the sole format until 2005,
when I created an account on LiveJournal and used it as a mirror of
the manually edited month files. I never really liked LiveJournal
as a platform, but it did the job until I installed Wordpress on my
own hosting space in late 2008, launching on 1/1/2009. I later
backported the 2008 month files to Wordpress, found it more trouble
than it was worth, and stopped there. My LiveJournal account still
exists, but I get almost no comments on it and assume the platform
is no longer as well-used as it was ten years or so ago.
I don't post on Contra as often as I used to. I get a lot more
traffic and exposure on Twitter and Facebook, and I periodically
gather short items originally published on Twitter into Odd Lots.
(I invariably add a few bullets that never went to Twitter for
various reasons, so you won't see all my Odd Lots on Twitter.)
That's the story. I enjoy social networking a lot less than I
used to, because so much of what goes around online is flat-out
political hatred. Still, it's one of the few ways to get above the
noise and be heard. I'm trying to earn a reputation for not being
crazy, but alas, the crazy stuff seems to get the most mileage
these days. There are insights in that fact somewhere (a lot of
insights, for what it's worth) but I'm not entirely sure I want to
be the one to describe them. I'd prefer a peaceful retirement,
whatever it takes. Mostly what it takes is not talking about
politics.
That's been my policy for a long time, with only very occasional
lapses. It will be my policy going forward, for as long as I can
write at all.