BatesLine 20th anniversary

Twenty years ago today at 6:01 am, the first blog entry at batesline.com came into being, an automatically generated entry proclaiming, "MovableType 2.63 has been successfully installed!" The first blog entry authored by a human followed at 12:22 pm, explaining why I decided to start a blog:

...Although I don't mind getting forwarded links that a friend thinks I'll find interesting, I hate to intrude on someone else's mailbox too often. A handful of times I have blasted out an article en masse to my address book, and I've received positive feedback each time, with friends thanking me for keeping them informed, and some saying they'd like to hear from me regularly. So how to do this without wearing out my welcome?...

Blogs solved my quandary -- I could blast one e-mail to friends and family, point them to my site, and they could visit and read as much or as little as they pleased. I don't want to be intrusive, but if you want to know what I'm thinking about today, here it is. Come and get it!

A couple of weeks later, I added some more meta-content:

Since I'm about to send a blanket invitation to many, many friends to let them know about this site, I suppose I ought to have an explanation ready in a prominent place.

This is a weblog, or 'blog' for short. It's meant to be a collection of reflections and ideas, mostly links to and comments on things in the news. Because my tastes are rather eclectic, you can expect this weblog to be eclectic too, symbolized in the names of the "stations" on the site logo above. Below you'll find comments on Tulsa's "Dialog/Visioning Process", urban design, and the joys of political volunteering, cute baby pictures, T-ball game reports, and a reminiscence about game shows.

My initial ideas of what a blog should contain was a mixture of commonplace book and diary, but reporting and commentary on local government soon came to dominate BatesLine. As inspirations for blogging I cited Instapundit, the blog of law professor Glenn Reynolds, featuring frequent short takes on the news, the conversational format of National Review Online's The Corner, and the Daily Bleat of columnist James Lileks. All three are still around, although only a few of the NRO interlocutors from 2003 are still there.

Lileks has a daughter almost exactly the same age as mine, and today he writes about flying to London to give a speech and to visit his daughter, who is at university there, and visiting a part of the metropolis where I spent much time a few years ago, Albertopolis, the museum district of South Kensington, home to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and Imperial College. His embedded Google Maps street views revealed to my disappointment that Baden-Powell House, built as a hostel and conference center for the Boy Scouts, has been sold because of the impact of the pandemic overreaction on Scouting revenues. It's now a corporate event center and the statue of Baden-Powell has been moved to Gilwell Park. Lileks spent a spare hour visiting the Victoria & Albert Museum; someday I hope to have a browse through the Malcolm Chapman Collection of Tony Hancock scripts and memorabilia, part of the V&A's Theatre and Performance Archive.

A month or so before my first blog post, our family had switched from dial-up internet (we had IOnet, Internet Oklahoma, which had been purchased by Earthlink) to DSL through Southwestern Bell. It occurred to me that, rather than sending out new email addresses tied to our new internet service provider (ISP), it might be wiser to acquire a domain name that we'd use for permanent addresses, whatever our ISP might be. We toyed with puns and plays on our last name, including "Bates Clef," but settled on BatesLine, which could be taken as a play on either the statistical "baseline" or the musical "bass line." Later in the year, I drew on the Line part of the name to produce a header image in imitation of the London Underground map, with stops representing topics. Following the pattern of Northern Line, Central Line, Piccadilly Line, I kept the two words separate in the logo, until about a year later when a friend complained of my inconsistent branding -- Bates Line, Batesline, batesline. I settled on camel-case.

A company called BlogHosts offered a preinstalled copy of the Movable Type content management system. Several of the bloggers I followed at the time used their services, including Joe Carter's Evangelical Outpost and BlogCritics. I don't recall for sure, but I suspect I went with the Silver package for $5 a month, a domain name, and 5 email addresses. (The allowances got dramatically better shortly thereafter.) BlogHosts was a small business with a small staff, founded by Jace Herring in March 2003. By November 2004, BlogHosts had insurmountable technical problems (taking BatesLine offline for a short time) and shut down completely on New Years' Day 2005, to the great frustration of many.

My first post of substance was about a proposed concert venue between Tulsa and Sand Springs, a privately-funded amphitheater designed for musical performances that might have filled the need that backers of a 20,000-seat arena claimed for their twice-defeated facility. The entry points to a long-broken link on another website, the first of many now littering the BatesLine backlog. BatesLine has made it a priority to ensure that our own URLs remain valid so that inbound links find their target, at the expense of updates to the look and feel of the site. In the following post, about the 2003 Oklahoma Republican convention, I am already apologizing about not posting for a couple of days, and the end of the post features the first-ever instance of the frequently occurring "More later" -- a promise for more details "when I have time" which is more often broken than kept.

BatesLine made its debut before the emergence of social media and Web 2.0. Short takes have since migrated to Twitter and family news moved to Facebook, where it's possible to define and limit the audience for each post. Now even long-form writing has migrated to third-party platforms, with Substack luring writers who were deplatformed elsewhere.

I've been asked when I'm getting a Substack. I staked my claim two years ago, haven't made any use of it, but it occurred to me that it could be a handy and reliable way to have a mailing list. So while actual content will continue to be posted here on BatesLine.com, you can sign up as a BatesLine subscriber at Substack and get notifications of new content. At some point, I might add subscriber-only content, but even that will ultimately end up here, possibly after a delay.

I thought I might go month by month and/or category by category through the archives, highlighting interesting finds, and perhaps I will, but I'm out of time for now.

More later.