Alligator Design
Notes
Propose a project

When we stopped writing on our own sites

For a few years, everybody on the web had a place of their own and wrote in it. Then we moved into other people’s buildings. It was easier, and we paid for it in ways we only noticed later.

Geert Valère AllegaertOctober 2026looking back on the web in the early 2000s

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died.

Jason Kottke, December 2013

In the early 2000s, a lot of us who worked on the web started writing on it, about our work and about everything else. I did too. You installed a piece of software on your own corner of a server, picked a template, changed the colours, and wrote. Someone you had never met linked to you, you linked back, and a conversation ran across a dozen sites at once, each one owned by the person writing on it.

It was fun, and there was an enormous amount to read. Every morning a reader program brought in what the people you followed had written since yesterday, in the order they wrote it, all of it. Nobody decided for you which of it you would see.

We blog

The word is older than the boom. Jorn Barger called his site a “weblog” in December 1997: a log of the web he had been reading, with links. In 1999 the designer Peter Merholz split the word on his own site into “we blog”, as a joke, and the short form stuck. The same year brought the first tools that made it easy: LiveJournal in March and Blogger in August.

What made it a movement among people like me was software you ran yourself. Movable Type, written by Ben and Mena Trott, came out in October 2001 and put a real publishing system on your own web space. WordPress followed in May 2003, a fork of an older program called b2. When Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, announced in May 2004 that many users would have to start paying, a large part of them moved to WordPress in a matter of weeks. Its downloads more than doubled in a month. It was, in hindsight, the first lesson in who owns the tool you write with.

The technology underneath was modest and open. A page with a permanent address for every post. A feed, a plain file listing what was new, that any reader program could fetch. Comments, and a small mechanism that told another blog you had linked to it. None of it belonged to anyone, and all of it worked between sites that had never heard of each other.

Into the buildings

Then the platforms came, and they were simply easier. No server, no software to update, no template to fight with. You wrote a sentence and the people who knew you saw it immediately, and answered. The threshold was much lower, and for many people it was the first time they could publish anything at all. That is a real gain, and it should not be talked away.

But the writing moved into databases that belonged to someone else, and the reading moved with it. In March 2013 Google announced that it would close Google Reader, the program most of us used to follow blogs, because usage had declined; it closed on 1 July that year. In December, Jason Kottke, who had been blogging since 1998, wrote the obituary: the blog had died, its job taken over by the platforms. He meant it as a provocation, and kept blogging himself. But he was describing what most of us had already done.

The price

Who sees your writings is no longer yours to decide. On a blog, everybody who subscribed got every post. On a platform, a ranking system decides who sees what, and it changes without notice. You can write something good and have nobody see it.

The address is not yours. A post on your own site lives at your address for as long as you keep it. A post on a platform lives at the platform’s address, for as long as the platform wants. When Google closed Google+ for ordinary users on 2 April 2019, everything people had written there was deleted. Volunteers tried to save what they could.

The web between the pages thinned out. Blogs linked to each other, and that was how you found the next thing to read. Platforms prefer that you stay, so links out are discouraged, shown smaller or ranked lower. What used to be a web became a set of rooms.

The writing got shorter. A blog post could take its time. A platform rewards what gets a reaction quickly. That is not a law, and long writing survives, but it is the direction the incentives point in.

A place of your own, again

The tools never went away. WordPress still runs a large share of the web, feeds still work, and reader programs still exist. A small movement, the IndieWeb, has given the old habit a name: POSSE, publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. You write at your own address first, and put a copy or a link on the platforms, pointing back. The platforms get the reach; you keep the text.

If you want that for yourself or your organisation, this is where I would begin.

Writing on your own site

  • Own the address. A domain in your own name, so that everything you write can move with you if the hosting changes.
  • Publish there first. The platform gets a copy or a link back, never the only version.
  • Keep the feed on. WordPress makes one by default. It is the one way readers can follow you without anyone deciding for them.
  • Link out generously. To the people you read and the sources you used. That is what made it a web.
  • Export what you already wrote. Most platforms let you download your posts. Do it now, while the platform still exists.

These notes

What you are reading is a blog in all but name: posts on my own site, at addresses I own, written at the length the subject needs. It is the same thing I started doing thirty years ago, for the same reason.

Read the originals