Somewhere between 2025 and 2026, I had my 30 year anniversary of having an online website. I’m not exactly sure when I started. I know I had yasd.com somewhere 1996, but prior, I had what is called a tilde site via a hosting company in Portland.
Tilde sites are sites such as some.org/~site that a person could access directly, as if it had a direct domain name. Back then, universities and other organizations provided tilde sites as a way of giving their people a direct front door onto the relatively new World Wide Web. Some commercial companies, such as the one in Portland, provided the service for the people like me, without a university address to call my own.
But, as soon as I figured out the intricacies of this whole new domain thingy, I grabbed yasd.com.
I picked yasd.com because I considered myself a YASD: Yet Another Software Developer. Back then, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, software developers, like web domains, weren’t that common. It just seemed like a good name for a software developer just starting out as a newly minted independent contractor.
When it came time for a domain, the very fact that I could easily get a four-letter domain, even one as obscure as yasd.com. demonstrated how squeeky new everything was with the web at the time.
I had yasd.com until 2004 or so. I dropped the domain because of the increasing popularity of a game in Japan called Yet Another Sudden Death. As you can imagine, having a domain like yasd.com because a source of frustration for several gameplayers in Japan, and a rather disconcerting uptick in traffic I couldn’t explain for me. Oddly enough, no one else has had the domain since: it has passed from one web domain scalper to the next in the decades since.
I settled on burningbird.net as my main domain at that point—a domain I’ve had ever since and that I’ll continue until I become too old and feeble to maintain my link to this web, and likely, this world.
In the early days of my web site there were few tools you could use to create web pages. I actually created a template and then manually edited each web page I posted. I could write HTML as easily as I could write English. Moreso, because structurally, HTML was simpler than English grammar. More importantly, I could see immediately when I did a typo with HTML, while it could take years for me to finally notice an embarrassing malapropism in my writing.
There…they’re…their…I really hate English at times.
Unlike other early web enthusiasts, the concept of an online diary where I recorded thoughts and experiences on a daily or even hourly basis was just something I didn’t consider. No, back then, I posted essays, fictional stories, detailed tech tutorials, and involved, complex, multi-page articles that could take me weeks to put together.
I didn’t formally start a weblog until I got a Userland account in 2000 or so. I had this account when 9/11 happened, which was, in my opinion, the event that triggered an explosion in both weblogs and interest in online interactions—the early precursor to today’s social media.
I’m not sure who were the first people I connected with online. I think the late, great Chris Locke, otherwise known as Rageboy, was one of them, and he helped tangle me up in a whole host of new and really interesting people.
I have happily maintained contact with several folk on both Facebook and Bluesky. They’re not folk I’ve met in person, and as I’ve gotten older and less interested in travel, unlikely to ever meet, but I consider them friends. Not ‘online’ vs ‘offline’ friends…friends.
I’ve watched people have kids and the kids grow up. They started jobs and have retired from them. I’ve read about their happiness, their suffering, their hopes and dreams and it never has mattered whether we’ve connected across a table or across the void…there are little niches in my life labeled with their names and my life would not be the same without them.
Gods, I feel so sorry for young people today who did not get to experience the early days of the web and weblogging. It’s the same as feeling bad for young people because they never lived at a time of Janis Joplin or the Beatles or Woodstock. Sure, they have AI and K-pop, but they’ll never experience the sheer wonder of putting something into a document and knowing that, by golly! People are able to see what you just posted in Mongolia!
Of course today, rather than ‘weblogs’ people have Substack or Patreon accounts. Including me. For the last year or so I’ve been duplicating everything from Burningbird to a Substack account of the same name. And it’s been handy. I can publish, people can get emails of my publications, they can add reactions to the writings and comment. In addition, I can easily incorporate other Substack writings as ‘restacks’ or shared in Notes.
It’s not the same, though. Most of the people I follow on Substack are professionals. Professional historians, legal and healthcare experts, journalists…in many cases, posting on Substack is a full time job for them. And they focus on specific types of writing, whether health-related, political commentary, history, news from the border, or legal analysis. And they’re damn good at it, too.
But that’s not me. Posting on Substack isn’t working for me. This new publication model just isn’t a good fit for me.
I am what you see here, a person who loves to write and has a weblog called Burningbird. I have written about politics, and technology, and displayed photos, and even written a fictional story about a war between web markup and programming languages.
In the future, I’ll write important pieces and silly pieces and personal pieces and pieces that just lie there on the ground, comatose like that drunk raccoon in Tennessee. I might even write a sequel to the the story about the markup war with the programming languages. But I won’t write ‘professional’ pieces because I’m retired, and I want to write what I want to write when I want to write, no matter how profound or silly. And I don’t want to compete with these exceptionally good professionals who get the audience they deserve for their hard work and their excellent writing and their expertise.
I do not have their audience, I am unlikely to ever have their audience, and I don’t want to try because it takes my love of writing and makes it into a job. And I’m retired, which means society is allowing me to have as much fun as I can with a body increasingly falling out of warranty.
I have an installed thingy that will post links to new pieces to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Facebook, and I might include a link in Substack, but you won’t get emails containing new posts. Frankly, I don’t need to enshrine my uncaught grammatical errors, typos, and above mentioned malapropisms in text I can’t alter later to correct.
I have a syndication feed, but no comments, no like buttons, nothing of the sort. When you put your heart into something and are met with silence, it leaves you feeling a little hollow inside. It takes a stronger ego than mine to ignore the absence of sound, so I choose to eliminate even the possibility of sound in favor of tooling around in my head and putting crap down in text. If people like the crap, great. If they don’t, great. If they’re not even interested in checking out the crap, well, that’s great too.
See? A win/win.
So, hi, I’m Burningbird. I love to write. I have a weblog, and that’s all I will have from today into the future.