My blogging history

I decided to write this article for three reasons:

• It's interesting to me — a record of personal history that I feel like I should hold onto.
• Another article will follow this one about why personal writing is so important, and I didn't want to litter that with a bunch of personal history.
• To show you a real-life account of how things change. It's impossible to know where things are going, and not to let that stop you from taking action on what feels right in the moment.

Finding the right historic perspective

I thought about walking through this from the perspective of the site. I knew I had several sites over the years. But I quickly realized this leads to fragmented storytelling because each site evolved in its own way over time.

We'll do this chronologically, to the best of my ability to quickly piece together some history today.

Thank you, Git and Wayback Machine!

The early days are murky. I have code and visual assets ... somewhere. I'm guessing somewhere in the mess of external hard drives. For now, I'll leave it as a hope to dig through those some day and fill in some of the gaps.

But for now, what I have are two incredible tools — Git and the Wayback Machine. While I have some early stuff in Git, I started committing content around 2015, and so there's a deep history of writing over the last 10 years. And even when I shut down a site, I still hang onto the repo, and that makes the research much easier.

Then there's the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which I often use more for interest than research. But, in this case, it's helped fill in some gaps.

Let's get to it then ...

The Beginning: c. 2011

I still remember the conversation that pushed me over the edge. I was refilling coffee in Messer Construction's old corporate breakroom, a space too brightly lit by too many fluorescent bulbs, even though one entire wall consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows.

A woman in HR walked in. We'd been discussing writing for some time. Writing, in fact, was the primary reason I still had a job. This company did whatever it could to avoid firing folks, and I was the beneficiary of that in 2008. Rather than ending my internship when there was no field work, they saw that I had listed "creative writing" as a skill on my resume. (Why not add hobbies when there's nothing else to fill the space?) Instead of not bringing me back, they put me in marketing (and eventually a stint in IT). Thus, corporate coffee (which was just as bad as field coffee).

She knew I liked to write. She knew I wanted an outlet. And I knew she was good at it. She had built a substantial following by blogging about motherhood. I admired that. The ability to focus, and the result of having people you don't know apply your ideas to their lives.

I couldn't decide what I wanted to write about. And she said, "It doesn't matter. Write about anything. Just write."

And that was the nudge I needed. Somewhere near the end of 2011 or beginning of 2012, I came up with the concept of The Polymath Lab. This was going to be about sharing everything I learned at work, from video production to technical writing to the little bits of code I was tinkering with.

The Polymath Lab, Part 1: 2012-2015

I bought a domain and spun up a WordPress site through some shitty provider like Bluehost, and I had a place to share my thoughts with the world!

I probably waited far too long to get started. And I'm so appreciative of the nudge. Who knows what would have happened in my career if I didn't have this outlet.

For the next three years, I'd write about everything I learned at work, even the soft skills. Much of this was throwaway, obvious content. But it was good for my brain.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good screenshot here. The Wayback Machine didn't capture the assets.

I had readers!

I look back and don't know exactly what I wanted out of this. Just that I liked to write and I wanted to log and share my learnings. I don't think I expected anything to come from it.

But, to my surprise, even in those early days, a few things I wrote seemed to help folks. I've kept the one that still stands out to me today around: How to run JavaScript on SharePoint Pages. For many, many years, it was by far the most-visited page on my site. (I just checked, and it's still getting a visit every few days.)

I thought I was doing something stupid with code (I probably was). But people had a problem to solve, and I felt good knowing that I'd help them get there.

Residual benefits of managing a blog site

In this era, being that I was also interested in code and doing some tinkering, the work I was doing got noticed. I had customized our team's SharePoint space. Then later bought a PHP book and started learning how to customize my website.

Sometime in 2012-2013, another coworker came up to me and asked if I would build her a website. So I did it, for pennies. And within a year, I had landed a job at an agency transitioning from PHP to Rails.

Rapid change: 2015-2019

I worked at a boutique digital agency called Topic Design from 2013 until early 2016. We were a slim staff and I was thrown into the deep end immediately. I had never built a Rails app on Day 1. And within a couple months, two of the senior devs left, and I was running my own projects. I had to learn fast.

I was still writing when I could, but that writing very quickly shifted. Although I helped with some creative projects, most of my work was writing Ruby code. You can see this today. Here's a list of my content files, or at least the mostly technical ones that still remain today.

When I left to freelance full-time in 2016, I wanted a fresh started. I made three moves...

Cobwwweb for technical articles

I spun up a new Middleman site that I called Cobwwweb, which would be purely about programming.

This came to life in early 2016, and would hang around until 2020, although remnants still remain today.

The Polymath Lab

At first, I intended to use The Polymath Lab to house the rest of the articles, which I classified into four categories — productivity, communication, inspiration, and motivation.

I spun up another Middleman site and gave it a nice new, clean look, along with a new logo (which you can't fully see in this screenshot).

Medium (2016-2019)

But then TPL stayed like that for three more years. I started writing all the non-tech articles in Medium.

Though I don't recall exactly why, this was an era of rapid change, and it was likely that I wanted a fresh start and a new focus for non-tech musings. In 2016, I left Topic to work as a full-time freelancer, which lasted only about a year and a half. Soon thereafter, my daughter was born. And in the middle of all of that, I was making new connections through a year-long, local leadership program.

I suspect I wanted something new. I'd also soured on Facebook around this time, and deleted my account in this era, which could have had something to do with the move.

In any case, I moved over to Medium, though I didn't migrate entirely. TPL just sat dormant in the state I'd left it.

My personal site

I'd also made the connections and built the confidence to start playing music out in public. I wanted to start to put my human self out there on the public web, as opposed to working through my writing.

So I spun up a personal site. (Look, I have hair!) For years, it was a one-page site with a few words and links to my other sites.

The rebirth of The Polymath Lab: 2019

For a reason I no longer remember, I decided to shut down my Medium account. Medium was making changes in those days to be less friendly to both readers and writers, but I'm not sure that was the motivator to me.

In any case, I archived my personal work on Medium, followed by a brief window where I wrote a few articles for The Polymath Lab. I aimed to get back to my roots.

Content consolidation: 2020

As I was getting back to these roots, the rapid change continued, enveloped in uncertainty. Yes, there was the pandemic, which would have been enough to qualify the previous statement. But there was another thing at play: I wanted to get out of the agency world, into dev tooling, and ideally into a DevRel type of function. I felt right and ripe for the jump.

I decided to bring all of my content together and to center it around me. One website. My site. And only the content that I wanted to represent me professionally.

While I'd like to think I was focused more on a return to simplicity, this was more about branding, marketing, and public perception of me.

The slow death of Cobwwweb and The Polymath Lab

So I built out a new site, which took several months. While I did this, I spun up a newsletter that I surfaced on Cobwwweb. The Polymath Lab hung around, but I wasn't adding any new material.

I launched my new site in the fall of 2020, while linking Cobwwweb as my primary blog. But that didn't last long. By the end of the year, I'd moved the Cobwwweb and Polymath Lab articles over to a new blog on my personal site, after discarding those that weren't relevant or getting views.

A note on the design

Before I move on, I wanted to note how much I love this version of the site. It's the most experimental I've been with any personal project, and I think it turned out great. And it makes sense — I knew what I wanted but not how to make it happen. So I hired a designer I'd worked with to help me come up with some creative ideas.

The floating shapes in the hero. The typewriter animation in the subheading. The layered background. The laptop graphic that extends into the text. The social hover animation. Two-column text layout. It felt like me. And it felt like a great outcome from some really hard work.

I built this site with 11ty. Simple. The beauty of this is that you can still see the animations in action today in the web archive.

A lull in activity: 2023-2025

This version of the site went through a few different iterations between 2020-2023. Eventually, I'd center my content on the site (instead of me). I'd add a few guest writers. Spin down the Spinneret. But I kept the content consistent.

And then in May 2023, I stopped writing.

I've had lulls before, usually as a result of being "too busy" at work. And this one started similarly. While I had proper balance at Stackbit, I took on some freelance work that ate up all my free time.

However, at Stackbit and Netlify, part of my role is producing content. So I have still been producing, but to a lesser extent, and more specifically to support these organizations. I suspect the lull would be much less apparent if I didn't have the writing outlet at work.

The future and beyond: 2025-

In any case, it's time to get back to writing. It's at my core.

And while I don't aim to convert this blog to personal musings (as was the outlet for me Medium blog), I'm not going to be so rigid about being strictly tech-solution focused this time around. I'm going to write for me first, but in a way that I still hope others can get something out of it. That it can spark new conversations.

I also aim to completely overhaul my personal brand and my site ... at some point. Probably next year. For now, focusing on writing is enough.