Hey everyone. I just wanted to thank you all for the well-wishes on kottke.org’s 25th anniversary. Reading all your comments, tweets, Mastodon posts, DMs, and emails really put a hop in my step this week. And an extra special thank you to those who bought a t-shirt (ordering is now closed nope, back open…people are still clamoring) or supported the site with a membership.
I also managed to make some tweaks to how the Quick Links look/work around here. I’m still not completely happy with it, but I hope the recent effort has laid the groundwork for better things ahead.
Coming up next week: the epic Ask Me Anything. I can’t promise I’m going to answer all 330+ questions you folks sent me, but I will do my best.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
In celebration of the site’s 25th anniversary, I’ve turned ordering back on for Kottke Hypertext Tees for the next day or so. Here’s what I wrote about them last month:
For much of the nearly 25-year lifespan of kottke.org, the site’s tagline has been “home of fine hypertext products”. I always liked that it felt olde timey and futuristic at the same time, although hypertext itself has become antiquated — no one talks of hypertextual media anymore even though we’re all soaking in it.
And so but anyway, I thought it would fun to turn that tagline into a t-shirt, so I partnered with the good folks at Cotton Bureau to make a fine “hypertext” product that you can actually buy and wear around and eventually it’ll wear out and then you can use it to wash your car. If you want to support the site and look good doing it, you can order a Kottke.org Hypertext Tee right now.
You can check out my original post for more details. These shirts were super popular (I sold almost 3X as many as I thought I would) so I figured I’d make them available again for folks who hadn’t seen them the first time around.
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence. What follows is my (relatively brief) attempt to explain where kottke.org came from and why it’s still going.
It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since I experienced that “thunderbolt that completely changed my life” — it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity. As a web designer in the 90s and early 00s, I helped companies figure out how to use the web for business, but the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.
I started making personal websites shortly after discovering the web, first using Notepad and then a program called HTML Assistant. My first site had an audience of exactly one — it lived on a 3.5” floppy disk and was mostly a jazzed-up version of my bookmarks file that I carried back and forth from my dorm room to the physics lab. When I was finally able to finagle public server access, I launched a site called “some web space” (all lowercase, because 90s)1 that included a hand-drawn graphic of swiss cheese and a bunch of links related to Pulp Fiction. This is me right around that time:
That tiny baby Jason loved cheese, Quentin Tarantino, and the World Wide Web, bless his little heart.
Anyway, the sites I built then were terrible at first, but I was obsessed and slowly they improved. some web space turned into a site called 0sil8, which became a playground of sorts for my experiments in writing and design. Every few weeks/months, I’d create a new “episode” to put up on 0sil8 and gradually I gained an online following and became part of a community of folks who were likewise experimenting with the web.
Around this time, more and more of what I was reading online were diaries and these things called weblogs.2 The updates on weblogs & diaries were smaller but more frequent than on other personal sites — their velocity felt different, exhilarating. But by the time I actually got interested enough to start my own weblog, there were so many of them — hundreds! maybe thousands! — that I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested. I forged ahead anyway and on March 14, 1998, I started the weblog that would soon become kottke.org. It was called Notes and here’s what it looked like:
I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Since 2005, kottke.org has been my full-time job and supports my family. I’ve met so many people from all over the world through my work here, including many life-long friends and my (now ex-) wife. I’ve spoken at conferences and travelled the world. I got to be on TV. I launched a membership program (which you should totally join if you haven’t already) that has given the site an incredible boost as it powers through its third decade.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of kottke.org, I wrote this:
I’ve been reading back through the early archives (which I wouldn’t recommend), and it feels like excavating down through layers of sediment, tracing the growth & evolution of the web, a media format, and most of all, a person. On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.
I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity.
That all still rings incredibly true and I cannot improve upon it as an explanation of why I’m still here doing this moderately anachronistic thing. Thank you all so much for reading. ♥
P.S. You can read my thoughts on past anniversaries and view some previous site designs here: 10 years, 18-ish years, 20 years, and 24 years.
P.P.S. I wrote a separate post about this yesterday, but if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!
P.P.P.S. Last one: I’m gonna write more about this later today, but I’ve turned ordering back on for Kottke Hypertext Tees for the next 24 hours or so. Go get ‘em!
P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I’ve thought of one more thing: I’ve turned comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on every post, but it’s been almost 8 years since the last time they were on. I figured it would be fun to try them out today. No idea if they’re even going to work or how long they will be available, but let’s try it out. If you’d like to share how long you’ve been reading the site or leave any memories or observations, feel free. My inbox is open as well. Ok, that’s really all for now! Thank you!
Update: A bunch of comments got hung up in a spam filter in my CMS that I didn’t even know was active. They should be all through now…sorry about that!
Good morning! Tomorrow marks 25 years of blogging here at kottke.org and it’s been more than three months since I returned from my sabbatical, so I thought it would be a good time to:
a) Once again express my heartfelt thanks to those of you who have supported the site over the years by purchasing a membership. Kottke.org has been my full-time job since 2005, and I’ve said this many times before but: this membership support is essential in keeping the site running so smoothly, with few membership solicitations like this one, very minimal advertising, no popup newsletter sign-up forms, a full-text RSS feed w/ no ads, etc. etc. etc.
And perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart, member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled. It’s not difficult to imagine an alt-universe kottke.org with ads crammed into every bit of whitespace, email collection forms popping up on every visit, and half the site behind a members-only paywall. No shade to those who have gone that route to keep things running — I’d probably make more money with members-only content on Substack or whatever and that pull is tempting. But seriously, I love you folks so much for collectively keeping all of kottke.org on the open web. Thank you.
b) Cajole those of you who aren’t currently members to sign up for a membership today or, in the case of former members, to restart your memberships.1 I’m not going to give you the hard sell here — I listed some reasons to join in the preceding paragraphs and if you’re a regular reader, I don’t have to tell you the value you get from the site; you already know that for yourself. What I’m asking is: if you appreciate what I do here and you can manage it, please support the site by purchasing a membership.
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I also wanted to give you a brief update & behind-the-scenes about what happened with memberships during my sabbatical and in the months since I’ve returned. One of my biggest hesitations about taking time off from the site was losing revenue from both memberships and advertising. I was unsure how my announcement would be received and was worried I was somehow idiotically crashing this tiny, fragile business of mine onto the shoals. After probably too much thinking/anxiety about it, I decided I needed the break more than the revenue and that I could build memberships back up again after I returned. It was a risk, but one I decided I needed to take.
When I announced the sabbatical back in May 2022, something completely unexpected happened: memberships went up. People signed up or increased their membership levels specifically to support me taking time off, and very few people cancelled. I actually burst into tears when I checked my member dashboard and saw this happening in the hours after the announcement. That display of support — and the hundreds of emails2 I received — allowed me the space and peace of mind I needed to fully disengage and disconnect from my work here to reflect and recharge (and, like, get some chores done around the house for a change).
Fast forward to the end of October. I wasn’t quite ready to return to work yet. Because I’d launched the membership program back in November of 2016, I’d say about 60-70% of all annual memberships still renew in early November.3 You may be able to guess what happened: despite a brief update on my plans to return soon, many people cancelled their memberships. That decline has continued in the following months, even after I returned to work. In fact, there are about 10% fewer members now than there were right before I logged off in May. So, the drop-off in revenue I expected when I took a break was just delayed by a few months.
When I returned at the beginning of December, I wanted to knuckle down and focus on the site and not bug you about memberships. Ship first, worry about revenue later. Now that I’ve been back at it full-time for three-and-a-half months, I’d like to build membership levels back up again, ideally to pre-sabbatical levels. Once again, you can check out your membership options here if you’d like to help me reach that goal.
Kottke.org is turning 25 years old this Tuesday and I’ll be doing a few posts this week related to the (silver!) anniversary. First up: John Gruber was kind enough to host me for a short chat on his podcast, The Talk Show. Our time together was pretty limited, but we still managed to talk about the good ol’ days of the web & blogging, my recent sabbatical, burnout, Dean Allen, kottke.org’s 25th anniversary, Suck.com, hypertext, Stellar, and several other topics I can’t remember.
You can listen this episode of The Talk Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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