I’m fairly sure I’ve missed the peak moment in history at which it was useful to Have a Website. I mean, that moment is without doubt long passed now. I actually had a website before that moment – my first one had a URL so long it might have been easier to dictate the contents of the page. It was a few months after that that I managed to steal this URL out from under the nose of a publishing executive of the same name – he let it lapse and I pounced – and I had a URL under my own name. That seemed like quite a cool thing twenty-something years ago, but now I realise that all it means is that you’re old enough that you could buy it while it was still available, which means pretty darn old.
Originally it was hand carved in HTML, then I built my own CMS in PHP (which is two acronyms right next to each other and I can feel your eyes glazing over from here), before there was such a thing as a CMS, which meant that it was hugely straightforward to hack, even by not-very-good hackers, and eventually it collapsed under the weight of the indifferent-to-bad coding and malicious exploits.
I resurrected it again using WordPress (before it became easy to use, though I notice that for some reason it’s become difficult to use again, all bells and whistles and whistles that make a tinkling noise when you shake them), and eventually it died again, possibly thanks to slightly more sophisticated hackers, and I replaced it with a flat index.html file that said “I used to have a website, but it died”.
But I have a gig coming up, and I thought I should put it on the website, and then I realised that if I was going to do that I was going to need a website and here it is. At the time of writing it’s very, very basic both in design and content.
And since I Have a Website again, I thought “Why not push the irrelevance boat out and put a blog in it”. That traditional, old-fashioned kind of blog – One post talking about how you have a new blog and you’re either quizzical about it or excited, depending on mood; three posts about random events in current affairs; another post six months later apologising for not posting very much and then eternal silence.
So this is the first post. The next post I’ll write in a minute, so it lands above this one, and it will have the flier for the gig in it and who knows after that. It’s not as if we’re short on current affairs at the moment, and I think I could manage eternal silence.