Postcards From Across the Pond

Twenty years ago today, I posted the first entry in Postcards From Across the Pond, which makes Postcards one of the oldest continually running blogs on the Internet.

No shit.

And Postcards wasn’t even my first blog.

To get a sense of just how historic I am, Justin Hall started Links.net—widely accepted to be the first ever Web Log—in 1994. My first web post was 26 March 1996, just two years later. I don’t know what Justin is doing these days, but I’m still at it. Granted, that merely means that he’s found better uses for his time, while I have not. Still, I think I should get recognition for my tenacity, if not for personal growth. Something like an Internet Attendance Award would do.

I cannot claim to have posted continually since 1996, but I did dick around with Xoom, GeoCities, Tripod (does that bring back memories for any of you long-time users?) and the like over the next few years, before buying the URL Lindenwald.com on 11 November 1999, which I still own.

I self-hosted a variety of sporadic and over-lapping blogs on my Lindenwald site, such as my Irish Dance Diary, Postcards From Suburbia (later changed to Postcards From Hell—I liked the Postcards motif) and my Bag-piping journey, until finally settling (for obvious reasons) on Postcards From Across the Pond on 5 January 2002.

Back then, the term Blog had just been coined, and we uploaded HTML web pages using FTP tools. And we liked it that way.

The likes of Blogger and WordPress came along soon after, but I wasn’t tempted out of my cave until the end of 2008. Since that time, Postcards has moved from Blogger to WordPress to Blogger to WordPress to Blogger to WordPress(COM) to WordPress(ORG), but—through all that—it has been in continual operation, and fundamentally unchanged, from 5 January 2002 onward, and that is, without a doubt, some sort of record.

Makes you glad you subscribed, right?

It has been quite a journey. Back in the day, when good content was hard to find (in 1999, according to Jesse Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the Internet) I managed to build quite a following, which enabled me to squeeze three books out of the Blog to Books craze, and they have done fairly well, thank you very much. The intervening years have seen many (or most…okay, almost all) of my followers move on (and why not: YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram, TikTok…why are you still looking at a blog?) while Postcards has not.

I could reasonably attribute this to an unwillingness to accept change, or an inability to tackle new technologies, or sheer laziness (and I wouldn’t be far wrong on any of them) but I truly believe, overall, that blogging simply suits me. There are many amazingly talented people out there uploading mesmerizing visual content to the digital tsunami that currently washes over us; I am not one of them. I am a writer. I write. Words. And that is what a blog is for, to allow you to sit calmly for a few minutes and take a journey, accompanied only by your imagination, and perhaps, a cup of coffee. This suited me in the late 1990s, and it suits me still.

If I have any regrets, it’s that, as my age advances, my adventures are becoming fewer, farther apart, and not as funny as I’d like. Perhaps this auspicious anniversary is the kick-start I need to get back to the world-class, humorous reporting on the minutia of my life that you have come to expect.

An irony that may be lost on you is that, I have, in part, kept this blog going for a specific reason, only to find that reason no longer exists. Allow me to elucidate:

Over the past five or six years I have, on occasion, thought about maybe packing it in. There was no real reason to continue Postcards any longer, and no one was going to lose any sleep over it disappearing. But I always came to this conclusion, which kept me going: I was (am) working on a series of fantasy/adventure books that I planned to publish, starting in 2021. Along the way, as I blathered on about that project (a sort of Battle of the Somme in my soul that I definitely was not winning) I continued to point out that publishing the books was the goal, not selling them, or making any money from them. So, I am now continuing to write Postcards, so I can talk about my project, having decided to not blog about my project.

Therefore, you will not hear me tell about the first book in the series, The Magic Cloak, which is now available on Amazon US and Amazon UK (and others, for all I know), or about how the second book, the Roman Villa, is now in production and, incredibly, on schedule for a May 2022 release (by Lindenwald Press, of course).

I had always planned to use this site to push the books (it’s my site, so why not?) but I have decided against it. So, I’ll have to find something else to write about.

Until then, Happy Anniversary to me. I am sitting here, at 5:27 AM, with a tankard of coffee and three Scrivener documents open, alternately writing this post, doing a bit of research and looking at a word count that is worryingly low, even for this time of them morning. So, I’d better get writing.