I started blogging anonymously in the mid-2000s while I was an editor on the Metro desk at The New York Times. Those old blogs died a well-deserved death. I don’t even know how to find them anymore.

Then in 2009, I became the founding editor of a metro blog for The Times. I found it useful to keep my hand in personal blogging (using my name this time) so I could experiment with some of the devices, apps and platforms that were coming along at that time (especially Twitter and the many third-party clients that grew up around it).

I blogged about some of those experiments. I also had a Wordpress blog about coffee in New York. I blogged about my first iPad and other tech, and my fascination with a new type of amateur content, podcasts. I had a Tumblr about all the old favorite out-of-print books I had kicking around our apartment. Sometimes I would use the blog for a personal essay that had no real place in the journalism of the newspaper where I worked.

Eventually I folded all of those various posts into a blog and a domain that I owned and controlled. I’m glad I did, because internet companies have a habit of going out of business and taking user content with them.

Sometimes I would go months or years without doing a post, thanks to a series of promotions in the newsroom that left me little time for writing fun on the side. It was a lot easier to tweet, and that is where the audience was. It seems like most of the personal bloggers out there — including many who were popular and made money at it — also stopped posting.

I retired from The Times in July 2024, and I am now taking some steps to clean up some of this material. As a first step, I deleted some posts that evaporated because they used defunct apps to aggregate embedded social media. It’s a shame, but that stuff has just evaporated. I also added excerpts and “more” breaks to some of the longer entries.

I am leaving those old posts up as a record of that bygone era, although I’m not sure anyone else will find most of them interesting. It was always more of a live journal than something seeking a mass audience, a snapshot of a bygone era when many of us were all still figuring this stuff out. Still, I was gratified that some of the posts found readers.

I’m probably going to start blogging again occasionally. Thanks for stopping by.