Starting Back Up The Brentter.com Blog
The last blog post on brentter.com was on December 29, 2011. It had been a while since I’d left my old day job in the advertising industry and really didn’t want to write about it anymore. So instead, I wrote about something I had done earlier that day for one of my clients, Use SQL queries to bulk-modify thousands of wordpress pages. There’s no irony in that being the last post seeing how a few years before I had to figure out how to change the video embed tags from my previous video host (which went bankrupt and 2 days later deleted all their videos) to youtube. When that happened all of a sudden 99% of my pages had non-working video embeds. While some were backed up, there were a lot that only lived on that now dead video host. As I re-uploaded what I could over on youtube that meant I also had to change out all of the embed tags. Now I won’t lie, my first instinct was to be lazy about it. Back then I was using wordpress/mysql. I did what most wordpress users would do in that situation and I searched for a plugin to do it for me. But low and behold, wordpress and php back then just weren’t a good combination for a long-running, resource intense task like the one that I was in need of. This had to be dealt with more directly. Every post was stored in a mysql table for the blog so all I needed to do was have it search for instances of the video tag and swap it out for the new one. So there it was, the worst day of this site ended the same way the last day of this site would years later, with SQL. At least it wasn’t DNS.
So Why Did You Care So Much About The Site?
Believe it or not, this website once was popular. It was consistently ranked as one of the top 50 advertising blogs on the internet (though this was back when very few people actually had blogs) and I was making a decent amount of money every month through sponsors and site traffic. Getting the content was easy back then too, I had emailed just about every advertising, PR and production agency I could find proposing them this great offer: Send me your ad campaigns before you launch them and I’ll give you free publicity. To add to that for emails that I’d send to creative departments is I would also post whatever attribution/credits you send along with it along with the ad. For production companies I’d email their creative directors and/or copywriters. While a PR agency might have seen a blog as not worth the effort, the folks who work in creative jumped at the chance of their names being posted along with their work. Eventually that led to me being asked to write articles on other marketing sites, most of which are now also dead, and scored me free passes to all the AdTech conferences in SF, Chicago and Miami (Thanks to Steve Hall for that, they were truly great memories). I’d eventually leave traditional advertising and with that maintaining this advertising blog became more and more of a chore than a fun hobby so one day I just decided to stop.
Why The Change Of Heart?
Even though I wasn’t writing in a public forum anymore, my ADHD practically mandates that I write notes for myself otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get anything done in my life. While the apps & methods I use to write have changed over the years I still find myself jotting down ideas, bookmarking new finds and cultivating a never-ending stream of content that up until now I kept to myself. This will be a slow change. I’m in the process of consolidating all my stored data, including the multiple sets of RSS aggregators I’ve set up through the years to keep track of interesting content sources by topic/industry. The logs on those alone are an insane amount of data. Everything needs to be cleaned & organized. I’m still debating how I’m going to go about doing that and whether or not it’s even worth it for 99% of the old content. Either way, the architecture of this site will most definitely change over the next few months.
Some Final Thoughts
One thing I really enjoyed about writing all the time on here and other blogs was it gave me a chance to meet new people, even if only for a brief exchange of comments. Tuning in to strangers and seeing what they’ve made has led to some incredibly rewarding experiences including some that eventually migrated from being online friends to working on projects together & meeting in real life. While there’s always going to be the dark side of the internet and all the strangers who feel anonymous sending messages on it, over-all it was a positive experience. While the internet now is just example after example of enshittification , I think a return to the old ways of the web is just what we need.
Welcome to my digital garden, I hope you find something interesting while you are here.
~brent