Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

It’s a sign of how neglected this blog has become that I failed to blog its tenth anniversary on 1 Jan 2011. The neglect is a sign of success — tweeting, blogging for Savage Minds, writing for Inside Higher Ed, and of course working on actual academic publications. Still, it’s a bit sad that I made it to ten largely through benign neglect. I wonder what will happen when this blog has its bar mitzvah?

Over the years my website was built with html, then Grey Matter (when it turned from being a ‘website’ to a ‘blog’) then Movable Type and then finally WordPress. PHP replaced Perl which replaced HTML. At the time it seemed amazing that with a click of a button a perl script could recompile all your html pages according to your specifications — an idea that now seems absurd in a world where pages are made on the fly and it’s server-end caching that needs to be updated.

Back then I had a one-column blog. Mostly because, frankly, that was the maximum number of columns allowed. But then as things got fancier and more possibilities opened up, I firmly resisted the multiple columns with their sidebars and column lists: it just seemed too new-fangled. Eventually the template took over and themes hand-rolled by mere mortals became a thing of the past: web design had professionalized. It became impossible to make a single-column theme, much less find one. And at any rate it just looked silly and old-fashioned.

And then came Manifest, the theme on the blog now and bam: the one column theme returned. Is it a sign? A new age on the blog? An old one? I love the throw-back look, which is such a return to how this blog used to be for years and years. It warms the cockles of my heart and, as Woody Allen reminds us, there’s nothing like hot cockles.