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Bloggus Caesari

Yesterday I tracked down one of the blogs I really enjoyed during the early days of blogging. The "Original Warblogger" blog done by Daragh Sankey, recreating letters from Caesar as blog posts from his military invasions.

01. Campaign against the Helvetii

May 13, 2001

I'm heading up to Geneva. One of the Gaul tribes is planning on cutting through Roman territory, in an attempt to go and fight some other tribe. I'm the governor of Gaul now, so I have to stop them... I'm caught a little off guard – there's only one legion up there, so I'm trying to raise some more at the same time.

Well, it looks like I might be away more than I'd like, so I decided to set up this blog. My friends in Rome can keep track of what I'm up to amongst the barbarians..

Posted by Julius Caesar at 04:09 PM

It went for over two years with posts intermittently and was one of the first (possibly the first) blogs which weren't just life updates and philosophical musings of real people actively going through what they blogged.

So yesterday I actually went and downloaded the full archive (which thankfully wasn't massive), storing it in Markdown for future perusal. One day. Maybe.

"40 questions to ask yourself every year"

The questions seen fun and worth doing. I'm going to do this as a retrospective on 2024, and make it something I do as part of the end of each year.

1. What did you do this year that you'd never done before?
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions?
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
4. Did anyone close to you die?
5. What cities/states/countries did you visit?
6. What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year?
7. What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
9. What was your biggest failure?
10. What other hardships did you face?
11. Did you suffer illness or injury?
12. What was the best thing you bought?
13. Whose behavior merited celebration?
14. Whose behavior made you appalled?
15. Where did most of your money go?
16. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
17. What song will always remind you of this year?
18. Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer?
19. What do you wish you'd done more of?
20. What do you wish you'd done less of?
21. How are you spending the holidays?
22. Did you fall in love this year?
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
24. What was your favorite show?
25. What was the best book you read?
26. What was your greatest musical discovery of the year?
27. What was your favorite film?
28. What was your favorite meal?
29. What did you want and get?
30. What did you want and not get?
31. What did you do on your birthday?
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
33. How would you describe your personal fashion this year?
34. What kept you sane?
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most?
36. What political issue stirred you the most?
37. Who did you miss?
38. Who was the best new person you met?
39. What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
40. What is a quote that sums up your year?

You Need Feeds

I love my RSS feed reader. I currently pull in over 170 sites and have them fed to me. It's a wide array of content from tech blogs and current events to art and comics. I'm in a constant hunger for new things to add to it.

Someone turned me to this site which comes with a number of "starter pack" OPML files, which are XML files you can import into your feed reader and add any number of new feeds for you to get fed.

I think I may move the automated evening posts into a separate thing. I go in spurts on this blog. And I don't particularly enjoy seeing a string of automated posts and I know it's not ideal for my blog readers (the three of you there are.)

I'm not sure the solution yet. I'm at the "Identify problem" phase of it. We'll see where I land.

I just abandoned a blog post this morning where I was trying to answer the question, "At what point in history did the world's computing power surpass the processing power of the computer in my pocket?"

It's an interesting question, but one which is not straightforward to answer and required too many steps of abstraction or assumption for me to feel like what I was saying was particularly interesting or, honestly, correct.

Dave Winer explains why he prefers his own site to Facebook

One of the reasons I prefer to write on the open web rather than on Facebook is that if I get an Aha! idea about a feature, on my blog I can implement it. On Facebook I'm just a user.

That was/is one of the great things about the web. Anyone can develop features for it. On Facebook, just their employees can. No wonder it never moves.

Indie Microblogging

I'm still reading through the site. It's a good read and reminder about what we lost as centralized services like Twitter took over.

This book would’ve been more profound if it had been published in 2017 instead of 2022. The longer it took me to write it, the more well-understood the problems of massive social networks seemed to be with the general public. Years after Cambridge Analytica, the 2016 election, hate speech on Twitter, and Zuckerberg testifying before congress, I started to wonder if I could even add anything unique to the conversation.

But for all the known problems, there remain very few proposed solutions. In the debate about the role of platforms, there are offshoots into new technologies, web history, safe communities, even antitrust law. These are threads that we need to tie together with a cohesive framework.

Big platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are built with small pieces of content. Lack of friction made posting easy. Amplification and engagement made creators influential. Native ads that are the same size as real content made platforms rich. That’s why the fix should also be rooted in small (micro) content: where it’s stored, who owns it, and how it flows across the web between much smaller, open platforms.

Edit: 5th of July, 9:20am - I'm still working through the book. It's a nice read and a good bit of nostalgia from the early days of the Internet (anyone remember Pownce.com? You get an interview with Leah Culver, one of the founders of it.) I really liked this passage, for fairly obvious reasons:

My blog is one of the most important things I do. It’s not my full-time job. It doesn’t make any money directly. But consistently writing, collecting a memory of those everyday events, adding my own commentary on technology, or chronicling the projects I work on — it becomes a substantial archive over time.