Requiem for a Dead Blog

When I met our new president for the first time. “Oh, you’re Gene Roche”, she said. “I looked at your web site.” That probably wasn’t a positive comment…

The site hadn’t been updated in a year. It was a WordPress blog with a theme that had been pretty outdated when I installed it in 2016 and certainly hadn’t got any fresher over time. The posts were generally long, images were few, the language was probably overly academic, and what structure was there didn’t really reflect my interests now. The site that had once been the center of my internet presence had become an embarrassment.

Long ago, I joined a small group of evangelists centered at the University of Mary Washington to promote the notion that everyone needed their little piece of the web that they controlled and that presented them to the world in the way they wanted to be seen. (The notion hasn’t gone away. Canadian Researcher Harold Jarche just posted an article

I challenged the students in my educational technology to Google themselves and to see if they liked what came up. I asked them to imagine that they were applying for a job and the chair of the search committee did a Google search–which, of course, every search committee chair did.

Quite a few of them started to do something about it. They registered a domain of their own, bought some space on a hosting service, studied search engine optimization, and started trying to manage their digital identity. I suspect that most of those sites are dead now, replaced by Facebook, Instagram, Youtube channels, and Tic Tock.

When I look back, building and maintaining that site was one of the more creative activities of my career even with all its warts. I enjoyed the technical challenges managing PHP and MYSQL and a host of other arcane sequences of all capital letters. In spite of some dry spells, I posted a couple of hundred mini-essays that gave me the opportunity to think a bit about some interesting things that I was encountering. I wonder if 100 days ¹ of attention, of tweaking, of showing up could breathe some life into this and become an outlet for my creativity again.