Hawaii Blog 2.0

Hawaii Blog has moved. And it’s about time.

When I first launched this blog in July 2000 — truly an eon ago in Internet time — I did so almost reluctantly, apologetically, stepping into the breach of “the weblog fad” that was sweeping through the journaling community.

Though it seems quaint now, at the time, many scrappy, old-school hand-coding escribitonists railed against the idea of reducing the art of personal storytelling to rapid-fire blurbs of outward-pointing links rather than carefully crafted, inward-looking prose.

The concept of Twitter, obviously, would’ve given us a heart attack back then.

The term “weblog” had apparently been drifting about since 1997, but “blogs” (and my, how we hated that monosyllabic shorthand) had only started to catch on when the concept and the tools to build them spread among online diarists. Home-brewed CGI scripts for journaling and blogging battled for installs, one personal website at a time. In July 2000, Blogger.com was a scrappy startup barely a year old. No one would have guessed it’d be bought by Google three years later. Or that blogging would change the face of the web, of the media, of politics… and, yes, online expression, interaction, and community.

Hopefully I can be forgiven for my initial skepticism. I mean, back then, there were furious debates over whether entries even needed titles. (I didn’t title my posts until July 2002, when I moved from the long-forgotten Greymatter to the sleek and new Movable Type). Today, blogs have proven their worth and staying power. As, I’d like to think, have I.

I hope I will also be forgiven for deciding to move this blog to a new site, and to a new incarnation. While I know such moves are a hassle for readers and becoming an all-too-common occurrence in the reinvention-happy blogosphere, I dare say I’ve earned one “update your links!” announcement over the past seven years.

So, please update your links, bookmarks, and RSS feed subscriptions. The new Hawaii Blog can be found at:

http://www.hawaiiweblog.com

Indeed, if you can spare a link on your website, a spot on your own blog’s blogroll, or even a post on your blog, I’d be very much obliged. The hardest part of every move, whether you’re talking about the virtual world or Valentine’s Day cards, is losing track of cool contacts and fond friends.

What will “Hawaii Blog 2.0” bring to the web? There’s a new look, of course, and under the hood, the unstoppable sweetness that is WordPress. But essentially, the new site will have everything you and I have come to love about this trusty ol’ blog, but a lot more of it. Better, faster, and geeky as ever.