I blogged for a decade, stopped for a decade, and came back when I realised the feeds were hollow. The tools changed. The impulse didn't.
The thing about running PHP-Nuke in 2003 is that you felt like a sysadmin and a publisher at the same time. You were editing config files at 2am to fix a broken comment form, and then you were writing a post about why open source mattered. The line between maintaining the machine and using the machine to say something did not exist. We were all figuring it out.
I blogged from early 2000s to mid 2010s. Then I stopped. Then I returned in 2026 with a personal site built on Astro v7. A decade away. What brought me back? That’s the question, isn’t it?
The Early Days: PHP-Nuke, WordPress
We started with PHP-Nuke. Then e107. Then WordPress. Each migration felt like a revolution. Moving from hand-coded HTML to a CMS felt like unlocking a superpower. You could post from a browser. Comments appeared automatically. You could install a plugin and suddenly have a gallery, a forum, a newsletter signup.
The audience was small but intense. We knew each other. We read each other’s blogs daily. We left comments that were actual paragraphs, not “nice post!” We linked to each other in blogrolls. We had blog rings. It felt like a village, not a city.
The motivation was simple: we had things to say, and the tools finally let us say them without learning Perl CGI scripts. We wanted to share what we were learning. We wanted to be part of a conversation. We wanted to be visible on the early web, before the algorithms decided who gets seen.
The Long Pause: Why Did I Stop?
Life gets busy. That’s the easy answer. The real answer is more complicated.
The tools got easier, but the audience got bigger. The village became a city. The conversation became a broadcast. Posting felt less like talking to friends and more like shouting into a canyon. The echo was loud but the replies were sparse.
Social media filled the gap for a while. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Why maintain a blog when you could post a thought in 280 characters and get immediate feedback? The friction of blogging felt unnecessary. The reward felt distant.
And maybe, honestly, I ran out of things to say. Or rather, the things I wanted to say felt too small for a blog post but too big for a tweet. That awkward middle ground. The place where most thoughts live.
Then in 2025, I quit social media. All of it, except LinkedIn. Not because I had a dramatic revelation. Because I noticed I was consuming more than I was creating. The feeds were hollow. The quick takes, the hot takes, the take machine. I was reading other people’s thoughts instead of forming my own.
The pause stretched from a year to five, from five to ten. The blog gathered dust. The domain expired. The hosting account closed. I became a reader, not a writer.
The Return: What Brought Me Back?
Something shifted after I left social media. Without the feeds, I missed depth. I missed nuance. I missed the slow accumulation of ideas over months and years, the way a blog archive tells the story of how you thought about something.
I missed owning my words. Not renting them on someone else’s platform, subject to their terms of service, their algorithm changes, their shutdowns. I wanted a place that was mine.
So I built a site. Astro v7, static, fast, simple. No database, no comments section (for now), no CMS dashboard cluttered with notifications. Just markdown files and a build command. It took a weekend. It felt like coming home.
What Has Changed
The tools are unrecognisable. We used to FTP files to a server and pray. Now we push to Git and a build pipeline does the rest. The audience is different too. There is no village anymore. The readers come from search engines, from social media links, from newsletters. They do not know you. They found your post because it answered a specific question.
The motivation has changed. I’m not trying to build a community or start a conversation. I’m trying to think in public. To force myself to articulate ideas clearly, to test them against the open web, to leave a trail of how I thought about things. The blog is a thinking tool, not a broadcasting platform.
And that feels healthier. Less pressure. Less performance. More honesty.
What Stayed the Same
Here’s the thing: the impulse is the same. The desire to take a half-formed thought and shape it into something coherent, to hit publish, to let it exist outside your head. That hasn’t changed in twenty years.
The web has changed. The tools have changed. The audience has changed. But the act of writing, of thinking in public, of being visible… that is constant. It is human. It is why we started blogging in the first place, before we knew what blogging was.
We are all just trying to say something true, in our own voice, on our own terms. The medium shifts. The impulse remains.
So here I am, back at the keyboard, writing into the void again. The tools are better. The audience is different. But the feeling is familiar. The quiet thrill of hitting publish. The hope that someone, somewhere, might read this and think, “Yes, that is exactly it.”