I spent Saturday morning doing something I've been putting off since roughly 2019: going through the drafts folder for this blog. Forty-one unpublished posts. Some are just a title and nothing else ("wifi router post???" sits there mocking me from March 2017). Some are three paragraphs deep and then just stop mid-sentence, like I got a phone call and never came back. One, dated November 2014, is a fully finished 900-word rant about why RSS readers were dying and nobody cared. Reader, RSS readers did not die. I was wrong. I'm leaving that draft exactly where it is as a monument to my own confidence.
Techpad turns fifteen this coming November, which is a number I genuinely cannot process. I started this thing on a laptop that had a CD drive, writing about Android 4.0 and whether tablets were going to replace laptops (they didn't, not really, though my nephew would disagree with me for two hours if you let him). Fifteen years of a blog is longer than some of my past jobs, longer than two relationships, longer than any apartment I've lived in. And the actual mechanics of running it have barely changed, I still write everything in a plain text editor, I still upload by hand more often than I'd like to admit, and I still don't have comments turned on, which is a decision I make and unmake about twice a year.
The comments thing deserves its own aside because I keep flip-flopping on it in a way that's honestly a little embarrassing. Every eighteen months or so I convince myself that a comment section would make this place feel more alive, more like the internet I liked in 2012, and I go install some lightweight commenting widget. Then within about three weeks I get a comment that's either spam for a mattress site or somebody furious about a throwaway line I wrote about React, and I rip it back out again. I don't think I'm cut out for moderating a comment section. I say this with some sadness because I do miss the version of blogging where people argued with you in public underneath the post instead of screenshotting it into a group chat where I can't see it.
Going through those old drafts also reminded me how much of my writing process is just abandoning things. I used to think that was a character flaw specific to me, some kind of ADHD tax I was paying, and maybe some of it is. But talking to a couple of other people who've kept blogs running this long, it seems pretty universal, you write forty things for every ten you finish, and the finishing part is mostly just picking a random Tuesday and deciding this one counts. I don't outline. I don't have an editorial calendar. I have a text file called ideas.txt that currently has 63 lines in it and I add to it constantly and pull from it almost never.
One thing I did resurrect from the drafts pile: a half-written post from January 2020 comparing static site generators, back when I was seriously considering ditching my hand-rolled setup for something like Hugo or Eleventy. Reading it now is funny because I never made the switch, and six years later I'm still on the same homegrown PHP thing I built in 2013, patched together with duct tape and a cron job that occasionally fails silently and I don't notice for a week. Every developer reading this just felt their blood pressure rise a little. I know. I know it's bad. It works, mostly, and at this point rewriting it feels like more effort than it's worth for a site that maybe 400 people read regularly.
If there's a point to any of this it's probably just that consistency beats cleverness by a wide margin. Nobody remembers my best post from 2015. A few people still email me about a mediocre one from 2013 that happened to rank well on Google for years. The archive is the thing, not any individual entry in it, and forty-one abandoned drafts is honestly a pretty small tax to pay for fifteen years of showing up. I'm not going to finish most of them. The wifi router one from 2017 is staying dead. But I might actually publish that RSS rant, just to have receipts on the record of how wrong I was.