WTF.

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August 4, 2009 at 12:01am

This entry is rated C for complaints… file here.

Where have you gone bloggers? It was 2003 when I first found you, when I suckled from your teet of knowledge and learned so much. I feel fairly solid now. I feel like I’ve come a long way. But now, I look to you and find nothing. In fact I find something much worse: apathy.

I bought your books. I saw you at conferences. Hell, I even follow you on your Twitter account and hope one day you’ll follow me so that we may direct message and share many a laugh. Oh, how we’ll laugh.

But you stopped writing. I looked at my feed and saw that you haven’t updated. I shot you an email to ask what’s up, but no response. “Well,” I thought, “he must be busy with all his internet money.” Several months later I notice your feed has gone grey in NetNewsWire. I shoot you an @reply on Twitter. “Sorry, been busy,” you say. Months pass, and my RSS reader runs bare. You’re fed, and my hand hurts.

Tweet.

I’ve seen you on Twitter a lot. More than most people, more-so then any hyper-busy person would be. You send jokes to your friends, talk about sitting on your porch drinking lemonade. I know not the lemonade-stained porch, for I have not the knowledge to attain such a position. 140 x 15 is 2100 characters, at least enough to post a blog and say “Hi!”

“Tweet,” I laugh, “tweet tweet tweet”. I stare at an open Textmate window, not knowing what to do next, what to type. I type the following:

I’m not even sure what to put before the html element. I’m not even sure how to embed flash movies on my site correctly anymore. I can read about Typography and @font-face, but still, find only conjecture. There’s a crazy new world of version 5s, 6 browsers and 300 JavaScript libraries and you are nowhere to be found.

I turn to A List Apart, hoping to find some solid tips on good modern practice for 3 freshly released browsers. Instead I find an article on XML and the Screenplay format. I turn to Digital Web. Gone…gone. I end up at Nettuts. Nettuts!

I look to bloggers I’ve always read and enjoyed for advice: Jeff Croft, Keith Robinson, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, Dan Rubin, Eric Meyer, Molly, Airbag, Aaron Gustafson, The Big Noob, Peter-Paul Koch, Mark Bixby, Merlin Mann and find one horse towns at best or grave sites at worst. They aren’t near half the sites they used to be. They are just pits to dump lifestreams into.

The Guru

I find comfort in the arms of Zeldman, the guru, still blogging after all these years, but it is mildly instructive at its best, mostly enjoyable as another form of writing.

I see a lot of links on the blogger’s sites to other people’s works. The comments written about these external links are fulfilling, a taste of what you used to write. I follow the links. There is hope, a glimmer, of those who blog and blog well. Who teach now online for free, instead of speak at a $900-per-ticket conference. They are new, fresh-faced, and in many ways much better than their predecessors. There are lots of them. They look hungry. Hungry enough to make you irrelevant. Hungry enough to make you have to pay to see them in 10 years. Hungry enough to make you think “Where’d everyone go?”

Then, blogger, you question my sad sense of entitlement. “I do what I want, it’s my site”. That’s fair. “It is your site. But at a certain time, I learned so much from it. You gave it up and I’m holding out hope. But I didn’t buy your book because of your Flickr stream… and this, web design or development blogger… I miss this.”

Drat.

They say that people don’t read anymore.

Well I read.

So, WTF?