Just joined substack

...latest in a long line of platforms

Here I am!

I was a bit surprised when Matt Taibbi said he was quitting Rolling Stone and beginning to self-publish his political journalism on substack. I was vaguely aware it was a new-ish platform that was gaining some buzz, but I wasn’t really sure how it was different from, say, Medium.

I’m not sure I understand it yet.

I’ve done a little poking around, and it seems to incorporate some of the features I like in Medium, some of the things I love about Wordpress. The user interface for writing posts seems very crisp and useable. I’ve been playing around with videos on Vimeo and more recently YouTube (due to easier closed captioning) and podcasts — so far only on Soundcloud although I spent an afternoon a couple of weekends ago looking at different podcast platforms.

But I’ve always loved blogging.

I think I began my first “weblog” in 2001 or 2002, on a platform called Radio Userland, which I don’t think exists anymore despite the app’s website still being active. I made a homepage for the company I worked for at the time, which does still exist and has a much cooler website today. And I bought my first domain, allosso.net, which I no longer own.

I’ve owned far too many domains over the years.

My first blog was a strange combination of photo albums, posts about things in the tech news that interested me, ideas for a science-fiction novel I was planning — that’s the airship link at the bottom.

You can actually still see it, courtesy of archive.org’s Wayback machine. Not that I’m recommending it. I was surprised, when I visited it, to find that I was already writing little reviews of the books I was reading. The three I was posting about in September 2002 were Thomas Gold’s The Deep, Hot Biosphere, Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood, and Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. So I guess my tastes have always been a bit eclectic.

When I became a graduate student in history, first at Mankato State University and then at UMass/Amherst, my blogging became more academically focused. I switched to a new domain called danallosso.com (which I also no longer own). I kept up that blog from 2008 through 2012, using a hosting service and a web app called Rapidweaver. It wasn’t as intuitive as MS FrontPage, but FrontPage had ceased to exist. I wrote a lot about books I was reading for school and for my own amusement. I’m not sure which category Pariser’s Filter Bubble fell in, but Stephen King’s book On Writing was an assigned reading in Heather Cox Richardson’s history writing class at UMass.

Over the years I contributed some writing to other blogs like the Historical Society’s, on a variety of topics. I actually wrote 46 posts for the society, which was more than anyone else except Richardson, I believe. I also ran a bunch of strange little sites called things like history-punk.com, which had its own “index of books”. I got it into my head in that era that as a trained historian I ought to respond to popular histories and pseudo-histories by right-leaning authors such as Glenn Beck. But also that I ought to try to make history more accessible to regular people. If Beck was the only guy doing it, I thought, then people on the other side had only themselves to blame if they lost the public argument.

But I was also trying to get an environmental history website off the ground. That one was partly to provide links to the readings I’d done for that teaching field, and also to support the online EnvHist course I taught for UMass for a couple of years. It still exists, mostly, at environmentalhistory.us. But the posts, reading lists, and reviews on each of these sites started to duplicate each other but also diverge in weird ways. And it was a big chore keeping all these sites up and posting to them regularly.

I had way too many irons in the fire.

And it was expensive. So ultimately I dropped almost everything, keeping only the environmental history site. Even danallosso.net has fallen by the wayside. I still own that domain and use the email, but I’ve no longer got a site or blog there. At least, I don’t think I do.

I discovered Wordpress a few years ago and I’ve played around with several blogs there. Mostly devoted to historical subjects. The one that still exists is a dual-purpose blog devoted to both Open Educational Resources (OER) and to the history I’m teaching right now. It’s now called History4Today.com, although the url OERFuture.net also resolves there.

But that “blog” is mainly a collection of links to videos and podcasts, and I thought it might be a good idea to start an actual written blog again. I like the discipline of writing a thousand words or so every day or so. This will be that. Mainly, I think, a series of posts about what I’m working on. A history of my work on history. Hence the name. I hope you find it interesting. See you next time!