It is a widely regarded fact that starting a new blog is a rather futile effort, despite the dopamine hit you may get thinking about all those readers that will definitely not come flooding in to read your prosodic outpouring.
Yet here I am, with a domain name to match the largely ill-conceived title I arrived at after thinking hard for exactly five and half minutes. And ideas for the strangely named “blog posts”. You see, I did wonder about that name. Why “post”? It raises questions that feel like they warrant a deeper investigation.
Long before anyone thought it was a good idea to connect billions of glowing glass rectangles together, humans had a fundamental problem: they had thoughts, and other humans were blissfully unaware of them. To remedy this, a person would write a message on a piece of paper, walk out into the public square, and physically nail it to a vertical wooden beam sticking out of the ground—a post. The action of attaching the paper to the timber became known as “posting” a notice. If you were a criminal whose face was slapped onto that piece of wood, you became a poster child (or a “Wanted” poster).
When the early, bearded architects of the internet decided to build spaces for people to argue about science fiction and coding, they needed a metaphor that made sense to carbon-based organisms. They chose the Bulletin Board System (BBS).
Instead of physical cork and wood, they built a digital wall. When a user wanted to share a manifesto, they simulated the act of grabbing a hammer and a nail. Thus, they uploaded a post to the board.
In the late 1990s, people started keeping continuous, chronological records of their online wanderings, which they called a “weblog” (literally a logbook of the web). A man named Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word into “we blog” in 1999, and the noun blog was born.But because a blog is just an ongoing series of individual entries, developers at early platforms like Blogger and WordPress fell back on the old BBS terminology.
They decided that each individual entry into your digital diary was, in fact, another piece of paper being nailed to that same metaphorical piece of medieval timber.So, when you publish an entry on your new blog, you are not engaging in a hyper-modern act of digital content distribution. You are just standing in a muddy village square, pounding a rusty nail into a tree trunk, and hoping the peasants don’t throw turnips at you.
And that, is that. So, here on Nearly Normal, you can expect more stunningly useful wanderings into the craft of publishing thoughts out into the vast universal digital-scape known as the World Wide Web.
Now? I must make a mug of tea. In the time-honoured tradition of writers sweating over the words they’ve written.