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One Day Ten Years Of Blogging Won't Be Much Of An Achievement

Jul 30, 2012
By .
Meta

That day will come in two years and seven months, when Popehat reaches its (approximate) ten year anniversary.

Until that day, it will behoove us to congratulate friends who reach that milestone. One of them is our friend Mark Draughn, who blogs as Windypundit. In the dark days of 2002, all bloggers were named Something-Pundit, just as, some dark day in the future, all restaurants will be Taco Bell. But very few of the CatPundits,  DogPundits, FarmerPundits, PsychoPundits, SuperPundits, and WhatsyoursignimacapricornPundits survived and continued writing. Apart from Bill Quick and some hayseed in Tennessee, Mark is the last of a dying breed.

He's commemorating this auspicious anniversary by giving useful tips to aspiring bloggers.  I disagree with 21.6% of Mark's advice, but what do I know? I've only been doing this for seven years.

Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-White

31 Comments
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31 Comments

  1. Grifter  •  Jul 30, 2012 @3:39 pm

    Congrats to Windypundit!

  2. Gal  •  Jul 30, 2012 @3:59 pm

    Aren't all pundits w… Ah, yes. I see. Golf clap.

  3. Chris R.  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:08 pm

    Demolition man was a good indicator of the future, I agree.

  4. Shawn  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:09 pm

    Nice Demolition Man reference!

  5. adam  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:10 pm

    the plug for demolition man was a nice touch.

  6. M.  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:10 pm

    Congratulations, Windypundit, and Patrick earns himself a shiny new internet for his reference to one of the most awesome movies ever.

  7. M.  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:12 pm

    As a teenager, I thought a pundit was actually someone who made puns for a living. Life has been one continuous disappointment since.

  8. Windypundit  •  Jul 30, 2012 @4:44 pm

    One other tip I could have given to aspiring bloggers is "Try to have friends at a really cool blog." Thanks for the shout-out Patrick. Nice Demolition Man reference. If I get the urge to download it, I'll be sure to do it through your Amazon widget so you get a taste.

  9. darius404  •  Jul 30, 2012 @6:39 pm

    some dark day in the future, all restaurants will be Taco Bell.

    Well, it IS the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars.

  10. VPJ  •  Jul 30, 2012 @7:01 pm

    Gal wrote:

    Aren't all pundits w… Ah, yes. I see. Golf clap.

    No, I think that would be WindbagPundit.

  11. Lizard  •  Jul 30, 2012 @8:05 pm

    My blog has been going since May, 2001, albeit with rather infrequent updates of late (mostly it's on FB now, damn network externalities…).

    Usenet posts of mine date to the early 1990s, and I was on CI$ ranting about politics in 1988, I think, or 1989.

    Damn kids. Get offa my intertoobz.

  12. Lizard  •  Jul 30, 2012 @8:06 pm

    (Oh, yeah, the blog being referred to is http://lizard-sf.xanga.com/archives/ . Don't waste your time going there, though, it's your basic "Hey, guys, I had Chinese food! And my cats are cute!" blog.)

  13. Wil Hutton  •  Jul 30, 2012 @8:29 pm

    Wait, is this Lizard-person an old-school RPG.net denizen?

  14. Windypundit  •  Jul 30, 2012 @9:37 pm

    Lizard, I totally agree, the kids think they invented everything. I had a web site in the 90's which I would update with my occasional thoughts. I didn't have any fancy schmancy blog engine, though; I edited all the HTML by hand, and I liked it. I also ran a timeshared Unix system with Usenet on it for a university in the late '80's. Still, blogs like Popehat are an innovation in which I've taken great interest.

  15. Tsarina of Tsocks  •  Jul 30, 2012 @11:01 pm

    @M – I feel your pain. The day I realized that hermetic seals were not the work of hermits… that was a dark day for me.

    hmmmmm… blogging since – counts on fingers – 2007… spring chicken, me….

  16. Phe0n1x  •  Jul 31, 2012 @5:15 am

    All restaurants will be named Taco Bell? DemolitionManseeswhatyoudidthere.

  17. Lizard  •  Jul 31, 2012 @5:16 am

    @Wil: Yes, that would be me.

  18. Lizard  •  Jul 31, 2012 @5:17 am

    Also, aren't hermetic seals sea mammals that live alone in dank underwater caves? (Well, I guess all underwater caves are pretty dank…)

  19. Dan Irving  •  Jul 31, 2012 @5:59 am

    I did the whole 'pundit' thing back in '04-'05 and it has languished since my 2nd child was born. I don't think I'd ever have the energy to restart. It's a lot of work to maintain a consistent production cadence and I applaud both Windy and the Popehatters for their effort.

  20. Stephanie  •  Jul 31, 2012 @6:22 am

    I've been doing this for 12 years – and I totally disagree with half his advice. ;)

    But good on him! :)

  21. S. Weasel  •  Jul 31, 2012 @6:42 am

    I arrived on the internets in the mid Eighties. We didn't have blogs then. Probably because we didn't have the Web yet.

    I am delighted to report that, last I checked, Usenet archives didn't go back much before 1996, so thousands of early examples of my own powerful brand of stupid have been lost forever.

  22. 0ptimist  •  Jul 31, 2012 @9:15 am

    …some hayseed in Tennessee…

    Ha! Oh, I hope he reads this.

  23. mojo  •  Jul 31, 2012 @2:17 pm

    A DATE with DESTINY!

  24. SPQR  •  Jul 31, 2012 @2:39 pm

    I couldn't get "assholepundit.blogspot.com" when I started out.

  25. occasional reader  •  Aug 1, 2012 @3:14 am

    S. Weasel, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, . And it's only incompetence and/or lack of shit-giving that Google Groups is so horrible, but the rest of Usenet is mostly in there somewhere.. Your youthful infelicities are, alas, almost certainly still around given someone monomaniacal enough to dig and possessed of some clues; fortunately that kind of wanker and any sort of competence usually don't go together.

  26. occasional reader  •  Aug 1, 2012 @3:15 am

    Argh, stupid link malformation. Let's see if this closes it. (Almighty editors, alternately, could you patch things up? Ta.)

  27. VPJ  •  Aug 1, 2012 @3:17 am

    I disagree with 21.6% of Mark's advice, but what do I know? I've only been doing this for seven years.

    I've been doing this for 10 days, so I'm still too stupid to know whether to disagree with WP's advice or not. I'm thinking another week should do the trick.

  28. mojo  •  Aug 2, 2012 @10:00 am

    Wait – the entirety of USENET is in Google Groups?

    Jeeze louise – a damn good thing that even then I was paranoid/smart enough to use an alias.

  29. Lizard  •  Aug 2, 2012 @10:37 am

    @mojo: The Internet never forgets.

    A few days ago, I was looking for material for an RPG I play. I found an archive site that organized a lot of stuff from across the web. I saw an entry on a topic I was interested in. "Nifty!", says I. I clicked on it.

    It was an article I'd written and posted in 1995.

  30. Careless  •  Aug 2, 2012 @5:45 pm

    Ha, I'm another RPG.net user from 15 or 16 years ago. Random corners of the internet poking their heads out today, it seems.

  31. occasional reader  •  Aug 3, 2012 @12:08 am

    Mojo — yes, in theory it is. They honor X-No-Archive in headers, and their interface to it is, well, to call it merely shit would be far too kind, and it's not entirely trustworthy, but other than that, yeah, they have it; practically speaking, best to assume it's in there somewhere. There was a big hullabaloo about a decade back around their rescuing of DejaNews and collating it with offline dumps of almost everything posted to usenet through that point.

    (Oh, and as for the botched link in my prior message, it was a link to the first ~10 years of posts as a bunch of tarballs at the Internet Archive, which google will readily divulge.)