I figured I would take a step back and write a birthday message about my personal webpage on the 25th anniversary of its inception. I intend to explain why it came into being and how it evolved over time, and to show some of the back-side technology details and performance statistics.
I started my website on October 9th, 1996 as a way of both exercising my creative side and mourning my mother’s impending death. I had a number of “commonplace books” from my college days in the style of famous Renaissance thinkers or Americans like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain who also had them. They sort of morphed into an online collection of my favorite quotes and passages from history and literature in My Thoughts Worth Thinking section. But that existed in the larger architecture of a personal webpage, which had come into fashion at the dawn of the Internet. I had a bio section, and an FAQ.
None of these have I touched much in the past few decades. But neither do I want to take them down. I wrote all the html myself at the beginning, and I use WordPress to manage my blog currently. Every January I post my resolutions for the new year, as well as list the books read and movies watched during the previous twelve months. The overall website has grown and evolved over the years: there was version 1.0 and version 2.0 of the front page.
Nowadays I work almost entirely on my blog. I got a notification recently from my CMS that I had my 50,000th visitor on my blog. Over so many years that does not add up to many visitors per day. In the age of social media almost everyone stays in the walled gardens of Instagram or YouTube or wherever, and so I get relatively few visitors. Almost everyone who comes across my webpage was searching for something else; they are looking up info about Thomas Hobbes or the Baron de Montesquieu for school, and maybe they then check out who is behind this site. Most of my acquaintances don’t even know I have a personal webpage, and many of my friends don’t either. That is the way I like it; I keep it sort of silent. But here is the point: I pay little attention to my readership and write almost entirely for myself. My website is a private venture quietly indulged, but shared publicly with little or no fanfare.
Sometimes I encounter coders who want me to hire them to help me to tweak the code on my webpage to achieve better SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) results, so as to allow me to get higher rankings on Google and other search engines. They want to help me get more visitors and to monetize my website. But I don’t really want more visitors. And I have never run advertisements or tried to make money on my personal website.
And I never will.
I like the idea that any visitor who came across my website did so in a serendipitous manner. And that I put in all the labor and expense to maintain my website for no other reason than 1.) the joy of learning and creation, and 2.) the desire for self-expression and communication.
But twenty-five years is a long time.
Where do my online logs tell me I get the most visitors?
Well, my webpages dealing with romantic Mexican or classical Spanish literature get tens of thousands of hits every month. I am not sure why. I suspect it has to do with high rankings for those webpages somehow earned on Google searches. But I don’t know for sure. A large portion of my online visitors correspondingly come from Spanish-speaking countries.
It is strange.
I also get a fair amount of hits for my Mama Morta page. I think it rates highly for opera fans researching Maria Callas the famous opera singer, or the powerful scene with Tom Hanks in the movie Philadelphia. Maybe this subject does not have much competition for online eyeballs on Google. But I don’t know. And I don’t care enough to investigate it much. Same with a letter I got decades ago on female circumcision, of all things.
The Internet can be peculiar.
Sometimes you just stumble haphazardly across unusual phenomena. Maybe you are doing so now while reading this page.
YOU HAVE A PERSONAL WEBPAGE?
The genre of the “personal webpage” is more than a little archaic 25 years after it first arrived online. Now more people go to social media websites to engage the contemporary hive mind online, usually in a combative and unpleasant manner. I engaged the social media world, too, but after I saw that Twitter was becoming a gladiator arena for denouncing others because of politics I left it. And I just about deleted everyone I knew professionally from my Facebook page, keeping just those I knew from childhood on and tennis buddies and family. I walked away from almost all my online contacts from work, except a few I could not bear to delete; during the President Trump years my workplace became toxic, and I was done with most of those people. Over the decades this is how my online life evolved. But my personal webpage persists as strong as ever.
I have had six or seven different providers host my site. I have at times quarreled with them over the service offered or struggled with some technological problem. I have also experienced troubles with viruses and hackers. I have needed to buy industrial strength protections for my website, believe it or not. Automated bots and other Internet security nuisances have occasionally afflicted me like stinging dragonflies. I get the occasional troll who objects to my site or others who praise it, but mostly I am left in peace.
And that is how I like my Internet experiment. My personal webpage is a bit like a garden which I plant in during fertile moments, prune here and there, and grow over time. Sometimes I am more engaged with it than others, but it has always given me a profound sense of fulfillment. This online experiment is how I try to grow my soul.
So I sort of figure I have 25 more years left with it. I started my personal website when I was 29, and I will be 79 in 25 years. That would be a good run, if I can manage it. Fifty years.
But we shall see.
Perhaps I will not be alive in twenty-five years.
The times and technology have obviously changed since 1996. Yes, a personal webpage is maybe a semi-obsolete vehicle by which to communicate in the age of “Big Tech” and social media. But that is ok. As Edith Wharton’s Newland Archer claims at the end of The Age of Innocence, “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.” I know fully well that youth and popularity (social media “influencers”) are to be found nowadays online at the Instagram or TikTok communities. I want nothing to do with any of that. I am 54-years old. The online world of 2021 has passed me by. And that is fine. There will be some new Internet fad in five years and everyone will go there, too. I probably won’t. But this website will still be here.
And the older I get, the less I aspire to be a part of any online community. Experience has taught me real life is where one should find community. Friends and lovers should be flesh and blood right in front of you, not made of pixels online or mediated by screens at arm’s length. I will never understand the practice of “sexting,” although I am told it is a common practice nowadays; some things are better done in person. The Internet has evolved over the past decades. I mostly haven’t.
So I will remain absent from the popular centers of digital life. Wherever is trendy and popular online, you probably won’t see me there.
But I am still here in my obscure corner of the Internet after two and a half decades. So happy 25th anniversary to my webpage!
It is still going strong.
I enjoy working on my webpage today as much as I did ten or twenty or twenty-five years ago.
Maybe tomorrow I will write something new to post on it? (Edit: I did write something the next day — “Malala Yousafzai, Grab a Rifle”.)
It’s a wonderful moment, isn’t it? I sit down in front of an empty page and try to say something intelligible. The start of the writing process is full of portent and possibility. I try to create an original essay through the creative act of composition. You seek to make something from nothing. I love it!
That wonderful creation — the written word, combined in nearly limitless combinations and fused by grammar to communicate a thought from one mind to another. It has a long and distinguished lineage.
Words written on papyrus rolls, or on parchment or vellum, or more recently on the printed paper page. But words nowadays are written online, too.
Yes, dear reader, you are reading these words on a screen over the Internet written by me directly to you.
They waited long for you to find them. And here you have finally arrived to read and enjoy them.
Isn’t it wonderful?
I think so.
Thank you for stopping by.
And happy birthday, personal webpage!
Twenty-five years.
That is a long time if you are holding your breath. They were the formative years of my professional and family life.
But looked at from a different angle, it has not been a long time. The years seem to have flown by — as will the next twenty-five.
I hope to leave the living record of those years here on my webpage.
It is like a diary of sorts.
The repository of my thoughts and impressions. My feelings and reflections.
My hobby.
The garden of my thoughts. My craft as a writer.
I’ll see you there, dear reader.
I’ll be waiting.
“Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,”
