Another decade of blogging

So here we are. The 2020s. Finally, a decade with a proper name. The 00s sounded like a computer error and the 10s like something accountants might discuss over a disappointing lunch. But the Twenties? That has swagger.

Last time around they called them the Roaring Twenties: jazz, cocktails, economic prosperity and people apparently having a very good time right up until the whole thing drove spectacularly off a cliff. Let’s hope history has misplaced the keys this time.

I have now published things on this site across four decades: the 90s, 00s, 10s and now the 20s. What started in 1994 as a fairly innocent little web project has mutated over the years into something considerably stranger. Part travel diary, part photography archive, part technological archaeological dig. And somehow it’s still alive.

Blogging away at a hotel room in Oslo 2007.

A decade ago, responsive web design wasn’t even a thing. Ethan Marcotte coined the term in 2010, back when we were still happily designing enormous websites for enormous monitors and assuming everybody had a mouse, a keyboard and the patience of a Buddhist monk.

Today most people arrive to the sites carrying a small pocket device, impatiently stabbing it with one thumb while standing in a supermarket queue. Naturally, we now design for that. The web changes. It always has.

Some younger developers probably haven’t even heard the old arguments about progressive enhancement versus graceful degradation. Mention either at a modern frontend meeting and there’s a reasonable chance someone will assume you’re discussing ageing rock stars. Maybe that’s fine. Every generation invents its own problems, then creates frameworks to solve them. Usually many frameworks.

Advertising for Martians.

What I’m less certain about is where the web sites themselves are going. We live in the age of Youtubers, influencers, stories, feeds and people filming themselves eating breakfast. And don’t get me started on “content creators”.

Writing several pages of actual text now risks earning the dreaded TL;DR, as if the reader has accidentally stumbled upon War and Peace while merely trying to discover whether a restaurant in Lisbon serves decent Bacalao.

Attention has become a commodity, and apparently we’re all running dangerously low on it. Still, I like websites. I like places on the internet that belong to someone rather than to an algorithm. Places with old photographs, broken links, strange obsessions, embarrassing opinions from 2004 and stories nobody would ever describe as “content strategy”. So Mink Machine remains.

After more than 25 years, I’m still here, feeding this peculiar digital animal with travel stories, technological nostalgia and photography of occasionally questionable artistic merit. I have no idea what the web will look like in the future. But assuming civilization, web hosting and coffee harvesting all survive, I’ll probably still be here for a while longer. Typing away, while everybody else is making a twelve-second video about it.