MegDesk

Despite a horrible case of writer’s block, I feel obligated to post something today.  For months I’ve been trying to decide what I should post today, and as the sun sets (which here in the north means it’s quite late) the answer has yet to come to me. Why the pressure?  Because today is the 10th anniversary of MegDesk.

I’ve told people that it’s the 10th anniversary of my blog, but that isn’t technically correct.  Ten years ago I’d never heard the word “blog.”  I simply had a website.  In fact, the actual word “blog” had been coined just a few months before MegDesk went live on its original home inside the Purdue servers.  So, today marks the 10th anniversary of the MegDesk website.

MegDesk was not my first website, and thanks to the recent closure of Geocities, the embarrassment that is my high school foray into HTML is no longer available to the general public.  So when I created the first pages on the university servers, they were thankfully less humiliating.

By the time I finally created MegDesk, I had been wanting to code a new site for a while, but the biggest hurdle had been content.  At the time, I was interning with the smart cards team in Austin, and thanks to continuous delays from Sun on the software I was supposed to be working with, I didn’t have much to do.  When Sun sent us a message that the software was delayed yet again, I shot off a tongue-in-cheek press release to my fellow interns (using ICQ – how old school).  Their response was overwhelmingly positive, and the first MegDesk post was born.  As it happened, I crashed my car around that time, and I got so tired of retelling that story that it fleshed out the rest of the first issue.

The original MegDesk News Update served two purposes.  The first was to provide an easy way to keep my friends and family updated about what I was up to, and the second was to keep my writing skills honed.  After a year of college (and an English TA with very lax grading standards), I felt that I was forgetting a lot of what I’d learned in high school journalism and Mr.Strickland’s grueling AP Senior English class.  Over the years I struggled to come up with clever news stories to share the updates in my life.  I got a job in Paris.  I learned to water-ski (sort of). I moved to Texas.  I adopted a cat.  I met Lucas.  We moved to China.

On the technology side, I gradually improved the site’s code as the internet evolved.  It’s hard now to believe that the original site actually looked pretty decent for its day!  I took pride in the fact that the main page has always been hand-coded (especially since FrontPage and DreamWeaver generated some extremely ugly HTML back then).  I slowly moved the markup into stylesheets, and eventually the time came to do a full redesign, though even that looks dated now.

Eventually, I got lazy about avoiding passive voice and sticking to the journalistic style.  When we arrived in China, I felt that I had a lot more to write about, and the interesting things about being an ex-pat could carry themselves without being wrapped in clever news stories.  That was when I set up MegDesk – The Blog.  I dropped the 3rd-person journalism and began posting more frequently.  In 2007, I stopped updating the main site altogether.

Since moving to Norway, the culture shocks seem tame and infrequent, and I find I have less to write about.  From time to time Norway still does things that make me chuckle, but it’s not enough to carry the site on its own.  Occasionally I dream of spawning off another sub-domain (perhaps travel.megdesk.com) to share our adventures, but I feel like the world doesn’t need another travel blog, and I never find the time to code a proper website for it.

Looking back at ten years of work, I find myself wondering where to go from here.  And so I leave the question to you, reader.  Why do you read this blog?  What do you think I should do with it in the future?  Should I go back to its tongue-in-cheek journalistic roots?  Should I just keep going with the strange mix I post now?  Or should I pack it up altogether?

Regardless, it’s been ten fun years!

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