I just realized this week—while cleaning up the kind of database cruft (legacy latin1 character set encoding) that comes from database in use for long periods of time—that I completely missed passing 20 years blogging back in May.

Open Parenthesis went live May 30th, 2006, with a post about the upcoming BarCamp Boston (the first of its name). I was just starting to really get in to open source and the emerging notion of an open web. (Emerging not because the web wasn’t already open, to be clear, but because the signs were already there that powerful interests might want to close parts of it down).

In the same month (technically one day earlier) Goatless went live as well – a place to talk about music, travel, and veganism separate from what I expected to be the more work-related Open Parenthesis.

I had created “internal blogs” (basically blogs only available inside the company intranet/vpn) for the Industry Practice Groups we were developing at Molecular (formerly TVisions, later Isobar). I’d chosen Movable Type, which at the time had some features we wanted that WordPress did not – but I’d also explored WordPress in that process and really liked the community and the core philosophy, so chose WP for my own blogs.

This was really my entry into not just using/consuming open source, but becoming active in the community: joining meetups and wordcamps, building plugins/modules and contributing (in a small way) to both Drupal and WordPress core. Ultimately this led to founding WordCamp Boston in 2009 (first camp was in 2010) and indirectly to the next 12+ years of my life at 10up and Fueled, in the WordPress ecosystem. (Optaros was more heavily involved in Drupal).

I kept working with MovableType as well, creating some plugins (circa 2008) for the ActionStreams concept on early versions of this site. (The original JohnEckman.com I think was static code, and created as a resume style site in 2003, but later was on MT as an activity stream).

I’ve not been the most consistent of bloggers—fell off substantially on Open Parenthesis after taking the CEO role at 10up, and Goatless has been on and off—but I was also never trying to monetize or create explicit value in the process.

Deane Barker recently shared (on LinkedIn) a report from Daniel Stanica on The Great Blogging Collapse. I’ll let him summarize:

I reviewed 100 past success stories and tracked how their organic search traffic changed from 2022 (when I first tracked their income) to 2026. The hard truth is that the vast majority have now lost 85% of the traffic. However, 21 of the 100 blogs are still growing, and I’m going to share with you today what those 21 have in common.

Glad I was not trying to make a business out of it. I suppose a bit of nostalgia about the blogosphere is a part of my late-midlife crisis, but I’m excited to see what feels to me like more and more people sharing their experiences on sites they own, not just walled garden social networks.