35 Years of Posting Things Online

The “what were you like in the 1990s” meme crested on social media this month. I’ve watched some folks claim it’s because “that was the last time before we had social media.” But I think my GenX cohort has hit a milestone—many of my friends’ kids are somewhere between heading off to college or coming home from college, and nostalgia’s running rampant.

In 1991, I was the promotions director for my college’s FM radio station. Any time we wanted to get the word out about an event or a special promotion, we loaded that information into something called Gopher — it’s one of the tools we used before the World Wide Web was a thing. Cornell University and Ithaca College had computer labs all over town where folks could pop in, check e-mail, harass someone on IRC, and look up events on a bunch of these Gopher sites. They were clunky and text-based and absolutely thrilling at the time.

I mention all of this because I realized I’ve been posting things online for about 35 years now. And I could not have predicted in 1991 that posting things online would become most of my job and take up most of my career.

As a means of rekindling my personal blog and reintroducing myself to new folks, here’s what happened along the way…

Around 2000, as my career in radio shifted into digital, I became the person at my NPR-affiliated station who needed to figure out how to publish everything we were making online. That meant learning how to code a CMS — and yes, it’s a running joke that every developer goes through at least one phase where they decide to build their own content management system.

Back then, we didn’t have the luxury of leaning on WordPress or Ghost. We had homebrew MySQL systems. We barely had PHP. I spent a long stretch developing on a platform called Miva that eventually just became an e-commerce tool. Not every experiment was successful, but a lot of them stuck.

From 2000 to about 2003, I invested a ton of time building content management systems for myself and a bunch of clients. Then WordPress arrived and my career shifted right back into creating content for the systems that — honestly — we still didn’t know what to call. So many of my fellow practitioners regret ever applying the word “content” to this work, and I get it.

From 2004 to 2012, even with other day jobs — creative director for a marketing agency in the Southwest, eventually a business manager for Apple Retail — I was still waking up at 5:30 a.m. and knocking out 2,500 to 3,000 words of online copy before 8 each morning for my freelance clients.

When the first iteration of our current agency launched with a content strategy focus, we started developing content for dozens of clients at once.

So that’s the arc. Thirty-five years of helping other people show up online.

And here’s the part where I have to be honest with myself.

The Cobbler’s Kids

As someone who’s been a media producer, a content strategist, a creative director, and a user experience practitioner, there is nothing that feels more like “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes” than realizing I haven’t posted anything to my own personal site in about four years.

Some of that came from burnout. I memorialized my father when he passed away. I don’t think I’ve shared with very many people how much Lori and I struggled as caregivers for someone with dementia. We bounced from two years of that, directly into COVID, followed by a few years of helping Lori recover from three successive accidents that required significant physical therapy. All while keeping the plates spinning on a variety of client engagements. No wonder I haven’t shown up here very much.

Lori and I have been reflecting a lot lately — about where we’ve been, where we are right now, where we think we’re going, and even what retirement might eventually look like for both of us. The through line in all of that reflection, for me, has been writing.

As I think more about what the last 14 years of running a consulting practice have looked like, I know the next 14 will look quite different. Not just because of the rapid changes roiling our industry, but because the kinds of contributions I’ll make to our clients’ projects are now informed by the experience I’ve built. I’ve been owning much of that transition this year—I’m no longer the guy who lumps out a bunch of last minute changes at 3am before a big presentation, I’m the guy coaching the team that’s now handling that work directly.

My dad never had an exit strategy, or a retirement plan. Both creatively and financially, he expected to work until he died. Dementia may have robbed him of that plan, but it was never a very good plan. In the past six years, I’ve evolved my own thinking about what the final few decades of my own time on Earth will look like. It will always involve writing, until the moment I’ve got nothing else to say.

I also recognize that I have a pattern. I go very quiet on my personal channels, and then when I’ve got something to promote, I come out swinging. That’s not the relationship I want to have with the people who pay attention to what I’m doing.

What I’m Doing About It

A big distinction I’m making going forward: my personal site will continue to be about my writing and creative work, as its own thing — separate from the client work we do at Johns & Taylor.

For much of my career, my writing has intersected with the process and business of being professionally creative—nothing more so than the work I did with emerging musicians. I’m bringing spinme.com out of archive mode and reframing it as more of a link blog — a little like Daring Fireball. I’ll write more about that over there.

I’m also exploring some personal writing projects that have nothing to do with anything most people who know me now have seen me do. Friends from the 1990s might remember the kind of fiction I was writing and publishing online back then. I’m bringing some of those ideas back now that I have a little more free time to explore them, and this site is going to be my hub for sharing that work.

My coaching practice is still running, too. People still show up with ideas they want to explore or transitions they’re trying to navigate. Despite my best efforts to wind it down, I keep finding ways to be useful there — so as long as that’s the case, I’ll keep the door open.

On AI, Content, and the Training Data Question

This post originally started as something about how all of that content I created over that big ten-year stretch is probably now training data for the large language models everyone’s been arguing about.

I’ve been experimenting with AI tools, and I’m finding certain use cases where they’re genuinely good for me. Casey Newton’s piece on Claude Code for Writers opened up a world of exploration for me. (I’d already been using Claude Code to debug some of my code and to troubleshoot issues on client projects.) Longtime artist friends (especially Leah Fasten and Ed Sargent) helped reframe some of the arguments for me about how these tools—which won’t just get wished away—invigorated their own creative process.

Large language models aren’t the only kind of “AI.” There’s a variety of other tools that are useful for creative work that haven’t involved stealing the work of others. And I believe that there are ways we can figure out how to ethically leverage LLMs for the kinds of things for which they can be useful.

The tools aren’t perfect, and the reckoning we will face over training data and environmental impact mirror the questions we still haven’t answered about music sampling and fair use.

That’s how I’m choosing to think about it, at least for now.

On Social Media and Owning Your Platform

I’m also trying to reduce my own dependence on social media. I’m rekindling my relationship with newsletters and feed readers — the tools that actually let you own the connection with your audience.

And I’ll say it plainly: I’m frustrated with how Substack has co-opted what should be a simple function for writers and turned it into something that binds people to a network they probably wouldn’t choose on their own. I made a silly little landing page at Hoagiestack about this, and I’m happy to talk to you (for free) if you’re a journalist or media producer who wants to build a platform for yourself that doesn’t require indirectly supporting fascism.

If you see me getting louder or more commercial in my social feeds over the coming months, know that a lot of that is my team figuring out how to use those channels effectively for the work we’re doing at the agency. Personally, I’m pulling back from spending a lot of time on Facebook, although I quite like the time I’m spending on BlueSky. But I also recognize that if I’m going to advise people on how to present themselves online, I need to be participating in the best practices I’m talking about.

The Commitment

Here’s where I land as I head into year 35 of posting things online: I’m going to take a real run at publishing to my personal site a few times a week. If you’ve been reading my stuff for years or if you’re just finding me now, thanks for being here. I’m going to try to make it worth your time.