Twentieth anniversary

Twenty years ago, I wrote my first blog post on this site. It was a simple, text-only post that said that I was going to South-East Asia for a few months and intended to blog about it and post some pictures. Twenty years later, disoriented.net contains more than 700 blog posts and almost 5000 photographs. I guess the moral is that you should be careful what you start.

To celebrate, I’ve posted 21 new pictures here that haven’t been previously published, one for each year that the blog has been active. There’s no particular theme to them. They were just pictures that caught my eye as I was going through my archives.

It would be nice if the blog’s longevity were matched by its popularity, but it remains a fairly low-traffic site that caters only to a handful of visitors every month (plus a great many web-crawling robots). Part of that may be because the golden age of blogs may have come and gone: changes to search engine algorithms and the progressive engulfing of the web by a handful of big sites like Facebook mean that most web users don’t tend to see much outside Big Tech’s walled gardens. A larger factor may be that the material here isn’t truly compelling: there are better photographers and better writers with more interesting things to show and say out there.

Still, I’m not sorry I started it. It’s been a good learning exercise, and it still gives me some satisfaction to see my pictures and words online. Being nothing more than a labor of love isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s nice just to make things.

I wonder if I’ll be able to keep it up for another twenty years?