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A Decade of Blogging

July 8, 2010 By James McNally 5 Comments

Late last night, I realized that it was the tenth anniversary (birthday?) of Consolation Champs. Although I’d started reading blogs in late 1999, and had actually been manually updating a page I called now.html for a few months before, it was on July 7, 2000 that I started my first real blog, thanks to the good folks at Blogger.com.

Back then, there were probably a few hundred blogs in existence, and I could link to all the ones I followed on one page. It was before the days of punditry, so there were no business blogs or political blogs. They grew out of people’s personal “home pages” and so were a form of self-expression. After reading about the first blogger meet-up at South by Southwest 2000, I became determined to meet some of my heroes and heroines, and the next spring, I did. I’ve returned each March to Austin and SXSW because some of the friendships I’ve made online and cemented there are very valuable to me. And I’ve stubbornly kept this blog going as a mostly personal blog, although I don’t post nearly as regularly as I used to. That’s partially due to laziness, but also because we have so many other online tools for keeping people updated about our lives (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc.).

But I’m proud of Consolation Champs for other reasons, too. By working with several different blogging platforms (first Blogger, then Movable Type, now WordPress), I’ve increased my knowledge of how the web works. In the early days, I did much more of the coding and design of my pages, but even now, blogging helps to keep me sharp on the latest web technologies. And all that writing (1,335 posts over ten years!) has sharpened my skills immeasurably. In fact, without rambling on here for so long, I would never have started my other blog, Toronto Screen Shots. Blogging has led to friendships and to work, and has expanded my view of the world over the past decade. I hope it will always be a part of my life.

Now, just for fun, here are some of the things I was talking about way back in the year 2000:

And that’s just from July and August of 2000! Feel free to read all 1,335 posts and I’d be delighted if you left a comment, too!

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Tagged With: anniversary

My Diary

April 18, 2009 By James McNally

I have had a file on my computer since 2001 entitled “I am beginning to write a novel.” It starts like this:

I am beginning to write a novel. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Just to begin something with no end in sight. To follow some path until it comes to an end, and then look back on where I’ve been. It won’t be a screenplay, or a play, although I’ve wanted to try my hand at those, too. The forms would be too constricting, I think, for me right now. I just want to get out there and run.

Of course, I’ve had to transfer this file from computer to computer in the almost-decade since I started writing it. It began as a sort of scratch pad for my thoughts during a period of unemployment (when I actually thought of trying to write a novel) and I’ve added to it on and off ever since. Well, truthfully, the last time I wrote in it was 2005, but I opened it up again today and added a whole bunch of new stuff.

When I first started this blog in 2000, I expected that I’d be able to use it as a sort of semi-public diary. I wanted to explore my thoughts about important issues like faith, politics, work, relationships. But it hasn’t really worked out that way. Sadly, along with many others, I’ve begun to contract my onine self just a bit over the past few years. I’ve talked a little bit about it here, this fragmentation of the blogging self into the personal and the professional, for instance. And now there are microblogging services like Twitter and self-contained social networks like Facebook. Between all of them, some have said, they’ve killed the personal blog.

I wish I could use this space to air out my thoughts a bit more, but I realize that it’s probably not going to happen again. In the meantime, I have a text file on my computer called “I am beginning to write a novel.” It’s becoming a novel, alright (currently at almost 60,000 words!). Except it’s where I tell the truth.

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal

Terry Fallis Wins Leacock Medal

April 30, 2008 By James McNally

Here’s a wonderful story. Terry Fallis is one of the founders of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the most social media-savvy PR firms around. Terry wrote and self-published a political satire last year called The Best Laid Plans. Not only did he publish it himself, but he used the book’s web site to market and promote it. As befits an innovative PR practitioner, he used all the social media tools at his disposal, making the whole endeavour a truly DIY affair.

About a month ago, Terry was nominated for the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, in the company of such literary luminaries as Douglas Coupland and Will Ferguson. The happy ending came this morning, when he found out that he had won. Bravo, Terry!

Filed Under: Blogging, Books Tagged With: pr, publicrelations, selfpublishing, socialmedia

RSS Woes

April 24, 2008 By James McNally

UPDATE: All fixed now. Pay no mind.

My friend Neil just let me know that my RSS feed is, in his parlance, “borked.” The problem is that it seems to have happened just over a month ago, at the confluence of a few different events. First, I added the Disqus plugin, changing my entire commenting system. Second, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. And last, but not least, I was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, seemingly as part of a strange hacker SEO contest.

So, as brilliant as I am (!), I’m having a hard time figuring out what’s happening. The feeds all validate fine, it’s just that they’re completely empty.

My feeling is that the culprit might be the upgrade, since a few other people have experienced this over on the WordPress forums (or is that fora?). But no one seems to have a definitive answer as to how to fix it.

Any suggestions? Of course, anyone subscribed to my feed won’t actually see this, but I’m hoping there are at least a few of you still coming to look at the pretty pictures.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: rss, syndication

DDOS!

April 1, 2008 By James McNally

As if updating my blogging software wasn’t enough of a hassle, it turns out that for most of today, my site was unreachable. It was the bad hangover of what looks to have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Wow, that makes me feel kind of important. Over the weekend, some malicious freaks hit my site over 100,000 times. These were page views, but the number of unique visitors was suspiciously low. The weird thing is that I had no trouble viewing the site until this morning, when the attack seemed to be over.

If you had trouble getting the site to load today, I apologize. And I’m glad you’re reading this now. No, not you, malicious freaks. You guys can go away and not come back. kthxbye.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: denialofservice, hackers
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