Today is my blog’s 20th birthday!

It started like this: at the time I was working at UserLand Software on a blogging app called Manila, and this was my own personal Manila blog. It’s gone through a few other engines since then. (These days it’s rendered — as a static site — by some Ruby scripts.)

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It‘s tempting to think that The Thing of my career has been NetNewsWire. And that’s kinda true. But the thing I’ve done the longest, love the most, and am most proud of is this blog.

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The original tagline was “You don’t need to be here.”

The name inessential sounds like a low self-esteem thing. It’s not. It was named for the idea that literature is inessential. Without it, people would still go on fucking and fighting and grocery shopping.

In other words, the name comes from huge and unwarranted self-esteem, as if my blog would be the first to be literature. Sheesh! Now I laugh at myself. What arrogance!

I hope I’ve matured, at least a little, since then. But I keep the name, because nowadays that’s just its name.

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Old proverb: “The best time to start a blog is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.” :)