This weblog began on February 9th of 2005. At the time, it was on the Radio Userland platform under Salon.com’s hosting. At some point I moved it to a self-hosted site with the same platform, but eventually functionality began to deprecate, and I found myself moving to WordPress on November 11th of 2011.
In the early years of this website, blogging was fairly new. Podcasting was just beginning. I remember being thankful and excited for the opportunity to write and create, and to publish my creations for the world to view. It was really through this vehicle, The Daily Dispatch, that I found myself, my voice and my tribe.
My tendency in those early days was to use Userland’s built in news aggregator to track dozens (or maybe hundreds) of RSS feeds to find things of interest to share, along with my comments. I would also write some longer form content of my own from time to time, but much of the time I was posting links and brief comments several times a day, in the same way that we do on Facebook and other social platforms now. The site lived up to its title back then.
Today, I migrated the last of my web properties (including this one) over to a new hosting provider. Sort of like when you move house, the process afforded an opportunity to take stock. I looked back over some of that content from the early days, and was able to get a sense of how the site has evolved over the years, both in terms of the types of content, and the topics upon which they centered.
My interests have changed a great deal over these 16 years, and I believe that I have grown and matured as a person. I find myself much less preoccupied with “the news” and the political landscape. It’s not that I consider what’s going on “out there” less relevant, but I find it much more difficult to see a way forward involving political work as we currently do it. In any case, that sort of thing is no longer my passion. For better or worse, there seems to be plenty enough passion to go around on that front elsewhere anyway.
Thankfully, there are a number of other things about which I do remain passionate, and I am excited at the prospects of sharing them.
In the weeks to come, I hope to give more attention to this site, posting items and links of interest along with short comments about them as I used to do. I also plan to add more poetry and occasional essays that don’t fit well with my other (now rather extensive list of) website projects.
I may also begin to create some audio podcast episodes again at some point, and if that is the case, I’ll likely use this site for shownotes, links and related content.
So, drop by when you can, or add the site to your RSS newsreader aggie if you still have one. I will not promise that the dispatches will be daily, but I hope that they will at least be more frequent.