Here’s to odd-numbered anniversaries: seven years ago this week, I started this weblog. I would’ve never believed it would have lasted this long, but yay for longevity. To mark the occasion, I thought it would be a gas to take a look back at the earlier incarnations of Scrubbles.net.
In the summer of 2000, I came across an article on “weblogs” in the defunct online magazine Feed. Intrigued, I dove into finding various examples of this “weblog” phenomenon, most of which were technology-oriented or simple online journals. At the time I was working at The Arizona Republic, mostly designing but also writing the occasional travel piece or music review. Basically I was a marketing guy who didn’t quite fit in the newsroom and I needed an outlet to blow off some writing energies. Why not start a weblog, just for fun? So I signed up with Blogger and cobbled together a simple template with the slipshod Scrabble tile logo seen here. The blog was housed on my own personal server with an inpenetrable URL containing a tilde (~). Gosh, it all seems so innocent now.
The very blue design #2 was in service from the Summer of 2001 through December 2002. This was a hot period. I was posting multiple times daily on anything and everything, Boing Boing had me linked on their front page, and people were flooding in. The blogging community as a whole was on the crest of a giant wave. Would it ever crash?
Design #3 was my favorite, so excellent that it broke my heart when the Great Movable Type Incident of September 2005 forced me to give it up. But I’m getting ahead of myself here — in retrospect, 2003 was a bad year for me. I was under a lot of stress at work and had to take several breaks from the weblog. Eventually I quit and underwent a major reassessment of everthing in my life. Gradually the scrubbles.net m.o. changed from quickie “look what I found” link-based posts to longer, more thoughtful pieces (well, as thoughtful as 400-word odes to junk food and junkier television shows can get). Not quite as hot and sexy as the latest celebrity gossip, but it suited me better.
The current scrubbles.net! At the risk of sounding totally self-serving, I feel like we’re getting better with each passing year. So here’s to more retro-goodness, wherever it comes from. If you yourself have a weblog — thanks for the inspiration. If you’re just stopping by — thanks for the visit. I hereby promise to be as unpigeonholeable as possible for the coming seven years or longer.