💡 the lights are back on.
Episode 039 shipped in 2003. It was a bordered image on a white page, and it said goodbye to the episode format — I was returning to a pure weblog, and episodes were a thing a younger man did with his evenings.
That was twenty-three years ago. This is episode 040.
The site never actually stopped, is the thing. It accumulated: 26,670 tweets, 2,137 linkblog entries, a reconstructed fruit era, a twenty-seven-year retrospective. But accumulating is not the same as making, and for a long stretch I was mostly the custodian of a museum where the janitor knew all the exhibits by heart and the gift shop was closed.
So this summer we did three things.
Locked the doors. Nine obfuscated PHP backdoors had been squatting in the archives since roughly the Bush administration, politely renamed by the host but very much still here, like raccoons in a wall that someone had labeled "raccoons." They're gone. So is the 2008 contact form that would cheerfully send email to anyone, from anyone, about anything.
Turned on the lights. The RSS feed advertised on the homepage now exists, which subscribers will agree is an improvement. There's a sitemap. The front page now deals a random card from twenty-seven years of stuff — I built it mostly so that I would occasionally be ambushed by a thing I forgot I made. It works. I recommend it. It turns out the person the archive most needed to delight was the janitor.
Resumed the linkblog. The last daily link went up in February 2008. The intermission ran eighteen years, which even by intermission standards is long. New links now flow through the front-page diary, one share-sheet tap from wherever I'm standing.
An episode used to mean a month of evenings and a MIDI file that autoplayed at you. Going forward it means something smaller: a page I made this fortnight. A sketch, a sound, a bit, a riff. Number 041 arrives in about two weeks, and I genuinely do not know yet what it is, which is the whole point.
(a robot helped with this one. it is everything robot wanted.)