I started Notes in the Margin in 1996. In those heady first days of the World Wide Web, the concept of blogging did not yet exist. What my contemporaries and I were doing then was simply called “having a Web site.” Since then, Web has lost its capitalization, and website has become a single word. And blogs, shortened from Weblogs, have become ubiquitous.
Much has changed over the last almost 30 years. As blogging programs and platforms came and went, frequently replaced by new, shinier products, I lost a lot of my earliest content in the repeated turnovers. The evolution from websites into blogs dramatically changed how content is structured and presented. I recently started looking over my early content with an eye toward sprucing up the blog. I discovered that I no longer have much consistent content until about 2010.
To see how “having a Web site” has developed over the years, I offer a new occasional feature, 15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin.
Looking back at July 2010, I discover that the literary world was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
I’ll focus on two posts from that month:
(1) From July 7, 2010:
I was gratified to find that the link to the Christian Science Monitor still works.
(2) From July 8, 2010:
Also, the link to the NPR page still works.
Looking at these two posts from consecutive days reminds me of the earlier days of blogging, when bloggers were still wondering exactly what a blog post could or should consist of and how often we should post. These two posts contain links with almost no context.
Later, I would change to aggregating weekly lists of literature-related articles from across the internet. I’ve now been doing this for many years, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to include a bit of discussion about why I’ve chosen individual articles to include in addition to summarizing each article’s content.
With the rise of social media, a lot of people moved away from blogging. But, with the current disillusionment over social media, I see increasingly more and more people advocating for a return to good old-fashioned blogging and personal websites for communication. It delights me to see this movement and the opportunities it allows for blogging to continue to develop and create community among individuals with shared interests. And it’s interesting to see how blogging changes as it adapts to changing circumstances.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
It appears to me that Substack is becoming the new WordPress for blogging—or should I say long-form blogging.