Today the blog turns 20

Twenty years ago today, October 29, 2004, my friend Geof set me up a Wordpress install on his server and sent me the keys to login. I wrote a hello world post and the rest is history. 20 years and 1477 posts later, I’m still at it. The URL has changed a few times. The original install was a shared site on rmfo.com/blogs. Then I grabbed thehubbs.net, thinking some of my family members would also want to blog. (None of them did more than once or twice.) But then in December 2007 I registered chrishubbs.com and I’ve been here ever since. (In early 2024 I migrated from Wordpress to micro.blog. I’m still very happy with that choice.)

My early posts set the tone for repeated themes over the years: a little bit of politics, a lot of music, theological rumination, and books. So many books. If I have a favorite post format, though, it’s probably bullet points. Sometimes you just need a post format to let you do a random brain dump, and then see how those random bits weave together.

There have been plenty of changes over that time, too. Shifts in political views. Going from one kid, to three kids, to two of those kids growing up and heading out. Going from a Baptist church to a church plant] to a Free Church to a little online church community, to finally the Episcopal church. Made lots of friends. (Often forgot to tag them.) Lost some, too. (RIP, Geof. I miss you.) Added family members, lost family members. It’s not all change, I guess. Through it all I still have the same wife, still live in the same house, and still have the same employer. All blessings.

I’ve never had an overarching philosophy for my blogging; I just write about things that interest me. I find the process of writing to be helpful for me to pull my thoughts together. If I can take the thoughts rattling around in my head and organize them into something that holds up when written down, maybe then I’ve really got something. I blog in spurts. I’ll write a post a day for four or five days in a row when the topics are flowing, then I’ll go dormant for a month. I’ve tried writing series (e.g. on NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope and positive politics), but usually struggle to complete them.

I’m happy to have maintained a presence online for two decades, under my own name, with content that I own. The internet has gone through so many changes in 20 years, but it turns out that a self-owned site with your own domain will let you stick around regardless of how the dominant platforms change. I’d recommend it. I hope to keep writing. If I’m still around 20 years from now it’ll be time to write another summary.

Moving my blog to micro.blog

So on a whim I reactivated my micro.blog site and threw 1275 markdown files at it - the entire contents of 20 years of blogging, first on Wordpress, then last year in 11ty. So far, I’m super-impressed. Micro.blog handled the imports and redirects pretty smoothly, has auto-posting to Mastodon and Bluesky, supports emailing, responses, ActivityPub integration… very slick.

I mean, if a week from now I decide it’s not a good fit, I just go change my DNS and point it back at my old domain. But at the moment, this looks like a thing I’ll stick with.

Reviewing Two Decades of My Thoughts

A big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.

Post Content and Strategy

Man, back in the early years I posted a lot. Almost every day for a while, or at least multiple times a week. I started this blog a solid two years before Twitter went live or Facebook became available for non-students, and I used it for a lot of mundane life updates that would eventually move over to FB and Twitter. Once I started engaging on those platforms (and particularly Twitter), my blog posting tailed off to something closer to its current state - roughly one post per week at most.

One thing hasn’t changed so much: I post a lot about books I’m reading. I have written year-in-review blog posts since 2007. My books tag has 165 posts. At times I tried to post about every single book I read; now I’m doing that in short form over on my books site and only summarizing and sharing highlights here. Still reading lots of Christian thought and theology, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Evolution of thought

I grew up in a very conservative, nay, fundamentalist Christian household. Those lessons stuck with me long into adulthood. To steal a hopefully-not-too-outdated term from the youths, wow, a lot of my old content is cringe. To be gentle with myself: I was doing my best to fit in and emulate the examples of good Christian people that I saw and read. And boy, I was good at it. The evangelical-ese just dripped from my tongue. I was super-earnest (good, I guess) and super-presumptuous that I had it figured out (not so good).

I was not always an LGBTQIA-affirming person. I didn’t write anything super-offensive even in my non-affirming days, but I was very clearly non-affirming. You can see cracks starting to form in that wall back as early as 2007 when I pondered whether the church should be fighting same-sex marriage. In 2008 I was reading a bunch of Andrew Sullivan, and was more convinced that same-sex civil marriage should be OK. By 2014 I was fully uncertain what I thought about trans issues, but was sure that we shouldn’t be breaking bruised reeds. I was at heart fully affirming sometime before the COVID era, but I’m sad it took until 2022 for me to publicly post about it.

My journey through and eventually out of evangelicalism was clearly also a search for heroes I could latch onto. Sadly, my posting chronicles how one by one they have fallen. John Piper (eek). Mark Driscoll. Matt Chandler. More recently, and less notably, but still: John G. Stackhouse. I listened to them, quoted them, looked up to them… and then watched them fall by the wayside. Their less-famous acolytes championed so many others that also went off the rails: Mahaney, MacDonald, Mohler. Maybe this accelerated my departure from evangelicalism as much as anything.

I still have a long way to go to undo the tangled mess of my childhood fundamentalism, but I’m happy to see progress. We’ll see what another 20 years bring.

Random thoughts and Surprises

  1. If you’d asked me who was most influential in my theological evolution by default I’d say N. T. Wright. But if you look back through 20 years of blog posts, another name rises to the surface: Richard Beck. I guess if you need a complement to an Anglican bishop, a Texan Church of Christ psychology professor is a good fit. My nerd self has a ton of respect for the fact that Beck has been blogging on Blogspot since God only knows when and only recently added a Substack since nobody except me uses RSS any more.
  2. There is one song whose lyrics I quoted probably more than all other songs combined: Rich Mullins’ “Land of My Sojourn”. Amusingly enough, I don’t have those lyrics memorized. I quoted them first as early as 2005 and as recently as 2017 and I’m sure I’ll pull them out again before long.
  3. There have been friends along the way who are, amazingly, still there and still influential, many of whom I have met in-person rarely or never. We owe Geof (RIP) for being the community leader and glue who brought us together, and I’m not sure any of us will appropriately uphold his legacy. I risk disappointing many by naming any, but two must be named here. Kari (whom I have never met in person but someday simply must), a children’s- librarian-turned-ordained-Baptist-minister who gave me an example of what a Christian feminist looks like, and who always had a timely encouraging word even when I was much more stubborn and conservative than I am now. And then there’s Dan. Have we really only met up that once? Dan is my Canadian brother-from-another-mother, homeschool kid, pianist, sometime worship leader, programmer, armchair theologian, and, most importantly, the inventor of the bullet points format that I adopted. Before we met in person I thought there’s no way this guy could really be this awesome in person. Then we met and I found out I was wrong. One of these days, my friend, we’ll meet again.

Wrapping up

I’ll write a proper 20-year anniversary post when October 2024 comes. In the mean time, I’m glad I had the chance for this retrospective.

Life, man.

Migrating to Eleventy

If you’re reading this post, you’re seeing the updated ChrisHubbs.com as generated by Eleventy, a static site generator. After being on Wordpress for nearly twenty years, this was a significant change!

Why leave Wordpress?

I mean, twenty years of history can’t be all bad, right? Wordpress was originally released in May 2003, and by October 2004 I had a blog up and running it. (Well, Geof was administering it for the first couple years. RIP.) And Wordpress has had amazing growth over two decades and runs a lot of the internet’s websites.

But Wordpress was starting to get frustrating. They seem to be working harder and harder to monetize it, even for users of the free product. Want any social features, sharing, analytics, etc? Use the Jetpack extension. Which is free for some functionality, paid for other. OK, I guess. But then they start giving you dashboard “site health indicators” which will tell you that you have problems and the only solution is to subscribe to the paid service. No thanks.

Why Eleventy?

There are a bunch of static site generators out there. I considered both Eleventy and Astro and did some demo work with each. In the end, I found a nice site theme/template I liked build in Eleventy, and it managed to build my full site without any hiccups. It’s a big site, so that’s a win. My path to publishing is a little more intensive than it was under Wordpress, but when I only publish weekly at best, I can survive that. It’s not that hard.

So, almost twenty years?

Yeah, it was a lot of posts. I cleaned up some of them that were just dead links, but I kept most of them around. Once all the cleanup was done I have 1263 posts migrated over. This one now makes 1264. It feels both monumental and trivial at the same time.

I’ll do a separate post with some more personal thoughts that were prompted by going through almost 20 years of my written thoughts. But for now, hey, at least it’s functional!

OK, so I bailed on Octopress

A few months back I tried a great blog migration - moving from Wordpress to Octopress, a Ruby-based static site generator. Octopress had the virtue of being static, of having posts in Markdown files instead of HTML in a database, and of generally being slimmer than Wordpress.

What I found after a few months of use is that the friction to use Octopress was just higher than I was willing to accept:

  • Write post content.
  • rake generate new_post
  • Paste in the new post.
  • rake generate
  • rake preview - make sure the post looks OK
  • svn add the new post file + new static files
  • svn commit to push them up to the server
  • log in to my webserver
  • svn update

All that for a single post. And if I wanted to post from a different machine, I had to remember to do an svn update first to make sure I was current everywhere. It wasn’t a fatal issue, but just more of a pain than I had anticipated.

Wordpress also allows nice things like posting from other apps, from my phone, etc. Not that I do much of that at the moment… but my intentions are good.

So my apologies to the half-dozen of you who subscribe to my RSS feed and saw it burp a dozen old posts last night. I got everything moved back into Wordpress and I think things are good to go.

The one thing I actually will miss is the ability to write my posts in Markdown. I know there’s a WP Markdown plugin but I’m not real thrilled with it. Oh well, I can manage HTML.

Where Are The Christian Daddy Blogs?

I had a passing thought in the midst of a blog post a few weeks ago that I want to explore a little more on its own. While writing about my podcast listening, I wondered this:

As an aside: it’s curious to me that while you’d find this kind of parenting discussion going on in the Christian blogosphere on mom blogs, you have to go to the secular arena to hear the dad’s perspective. What’s up with that?

I was sort of hoping that readers (of which I have at least a few) would chime in to let me know that I was just missing the Christian dad podcasts and blogs, but no. The only thing I heard in that regard was a note from my friend Mike noting that he’d been considering starting up that sort of podcast himself.

I did a little bit of Googling today for Christian dad blogs, and didn’t find too many. I came across one post from six months ago where someone on DaddyBlogger.com made a “definitive guide of Christian Dad Bloggers”, but if you follow the links,(and there are only about 20 listed) the blogs are for the most part either very sports oriented or seem to be basic guy blogs rather than focusing on parenting in any substantive way.

i <3 You

Sure, there are lots of podcasts and blogs out there targeted at men and fathers, but for the most part they’re focused around things like leadership, or legacy, or work/life balance.

Now yeah, it’s important for men to set a good example for their children, and to take responsibility for their spiritual development, and so on. Absolutely.

But why don’t we see blog posts for dads about other aspects of parenting? Is a dad’s realm of activity and advice limited to “make sure the kids develop a correct theology” and “make sure you’re around enough to go to their sports events” and “take your daughters on dates”?

Where are the Christian dad blogs talking about effective bedtime strategies for preschoolers, or how to handle discipline in public situations (or private ones!), or dealing with toddlers who don’t want to eat anything but hot dogs for weeks at a time, or how to not go insane when your four-year-old asks you to read the same My Little Pony book for bedtime for the seven-hundredth day in a row?

Or about encouraging healthy eating and physical activity, and about teaching kids how to enjoy entertainment in appropriate avenues and quantities? About how to make sure your kid doesn’t grow up with his nose glued to an electronic device for 25 hours a day even when your inclination is to jump for the iPhone in your pocket every time it beeps?

How about practical advice for using time-outs and other ways of defusing situations where kids have just lost it and need time to reset attitudes rather than just escalating a battle of wills forever?

OK, I don’t need to go on for another three paragraphs. And I’m sure that somewhere along the way somebody has written a dad-related blog post on most of these subjects. But what I’m asking today is why we don’t see posts focused that way on a more regular basis?

I’ve got three daughters and have been a dad for almost 10 years now, and I can say with assurance that there should be a lot more to being a dad than just family devotions and soccer games. Just because some of the more home-related topics tend to the focus of moms rather than dads doesn’t mean that they always should be.

So, my readers, any thoughts on why this disparity exists? Am I asking a question with such an obvious answer that I’m stupid for asking? Is the disparity simply a product of the fact that moms spend more time with the kids than dads do?

If you read this and know of good Christian dad blogs or podcasts, leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to find out that there are a bunch of them floating around that I just haven’t located.

In which I sing the praises of NewsBlur

I realize that everyone reading this has already either made a decision on a Google Reader replacement, or just had their eyes glaze over when I said “Google Reader replacement”, which means this post is probably unnecessary. But still, I want to take a second to sing the praises of NewsBlur.

NewsBlur is an RSS reader developed and maintained by one guy, Samuel Clay. He was working on it long before Google announced that they were killing Reader, and when that announcement came out he managed to scale up his reader from supporting a couple thousand users to, at current count, over 20,000.

Not only is the tool nice to look at and snappy, but Samuel’s support is fantastic. I filed a help ticket yesterday morning complaining about a reload that wasn’t working, and by last night he had it fixed. It seems even snappier today, which is awesome.

I’m not opposed to paying for services I find useful, and I’m quite happy to be a premium user of NewsBlur and throw a few bucks Samuel’s way on a regular basis. Here’s hoping that NewsBlur continues to succeed long-term, and that other developers follow Samuel’s lead in creating great services.

The sure sign that I'm not blogging enough...

…is that I start blogging about blogging, and I start thinking more about how I’m going to modify my blog layout/structure/etc than what I’m going to write about next.

That being said, I’ve been tempted lately to mess around with Jekyll, spin a simple layout/theme of my own, and convert this site to a static site driven by text file inputs.

But if I’m honest with myself, I know that my blog doesn’t get so much traffic that making it static actually matters performance-wise, and I might not even like the blogging process as much when I change it up. I’m really just interested in the setup and conversion process.

I think I need to find something more productive to work on.

The desire of every blogger

Thanks to Mo Willems:

What's this place about, anyway?

I’ve watched with interest the transformation of an internet acquaintance’s blog over the past several months. In past years his blog has been, in many ways, similar to mine - intermittent family updates, pictures of the kids, occasional rants on music or politics, etc. I subscribed to the blog and enjoyed the occasional updates.

Then several months ago this acquaintance started a topical blog in earnest, then remade his personal blog as the beginning of an organized effort to try to help along the book he is writing. As I’ve followed the blog feed, I’ve seen him follow all the pro-blogger tips - posting at consistent, regular, intervals; asking questions to engage the audience; coming up with catchy titles for the posts; posting lots of multimedia; the list goes on and on. And here’s the thing: while I wish him all the best with his blog and book efforts, I find myself not interested in his blog any more. It’s no longer really about him so much as it is about his brand.

As I was thinking through this, I asked myself a question that’s a good question for all bloggers who are hoping to attract readers: “Fill in the blank: I would recommend this blog to people who are interested in _____”. The answer to that question gives you two things: (1) an idea of who to market your blog to, and (2) the type of content you should be writing to keep them coming back.

I’ll let my book-writing friend work through those questions himself; I just want to turn the question back on myself. To whom would I recommend this blog? And the best answer I can come up with is: people who are interested in me, or in many of the same things I’m interested in.

Until the day I become a massive celebrity, this will naturally keep my readership small (though it’s probably still larger than the quality of the content deserves!). And I’m OK with that - in fact, it’s sort of a relief. When I keep my expectations low, I don’t feel the pressure to serve the blog - the blog can serve me. And that’s how it should be.