Previously

black and white continuous line drawing of a network map or graph of the blogosphere with circluar nodes that vibrate out energy and influence the other nodes and lines and the whole drawing sits completely inside the frame not extending beyond minimalist line drawings and white space around the edge
Created w/ Midjourney v6, prompt in alt

I started my first blog as “Centripetal Notion” in 2004, a name I thought was terrifically clever as a freshman in college. I can’t find a screenshot of the original site, but here’s one from the redesign a year later:

image

This site taught me about WordPress, the fundamentals of web development, and was my gateway to the emerging blogosphere and Web 2.0 scene at the time.

Shortly after I joined the 9rules blog network, which featured writers such as Pete Cashmore and Om Malik, and my education continued. 9rules went on to win best community at SXSW in 2006.

On my blog I curated and commented on art, design, technology, and internet culture. You can tell as much from the word cloud in the screenshot above. At one point I was reading 250 RSS feeds daily, my pre-Twitter social network.

Around 2008 I got into local blogging and citizen journalism. With some friends I started CLT Blog (cltblog.com), which later spawned The PPL (theppl.us), and for the next several years, most of my blogging energy went into those, so my personal blog fell quiet.

Later in 2014, I received a small fellowship from Tumblr to do a bit of blogging at gov.tumblr.com. I took the opportunity to migrate my old personal WordPress blog’s content to Tumblr (tumblr.com/jruckman), which kicked off a couple years of renewed art & design curation. All of this still lives on Tumblr today, though has been untouched for years.

Since then I’ve written a little about technology on Medium (jruck.medium.com), and a bit about my career on Notion (jruck.us).

As I look to write more, I find myself wanting to import and consolidate all of this back into a single archive, and perhaps I will. But that also seems like an excellent distraction from actually writing! So for now, this post will do just fine.


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