I realized something only very recently—I’ve been blogging on this site for 20 years. That’s an incredible number, especially when you consider that’s almost half my life (which really makes me feel old). I have no profound insights about this milestone or the discipline of blogging, but I wanted to look back at my own evolution as a professional through the development of this site.
The Genesis of Siolon
The first question to ask: How did this site come about, and what in the world does Siolon mean? This site started as a portfolio for my WordPress consulting work while I was in college. I was thoroughly enamored with WordPress, and I loved helping small companies, churches, and education centers build on the platform. I created many sites in those early days, and I really got into the WordPress ecosystem. I built plugins, themes, and I even contributed to the WordPress core. It was a big part of who I was at the time, and I loved frontend engineering.
As for the site name, I wish I had some profound insight to offer you, but I don’t. If I remember correctly, I wanted a unique domain to make people look it up when they received emails from me. The idea is they would get an email from @siolon.com and be so intrigued they had to look it up. I believe I made up the word originally and thought I was so clever.
As college ended, so did my desire to freelance. I transitioned from being a college student and civilian employee with the Air Force to a contractor. I was thrown into doing development on an ASP.NET application, and the learning curve took my time away from freelancing. I even announced the transition from a freelance business to a blog. I saw the rise of blogging and wanted to provide assistance to others as I had received from other blogs.
The Transition to Blogging
I was already blogging quite intensely on another blog during college focused on theology and philosophy (I no longer have it online). It was a natural segue to start blogging about professional topics. My first post oddly was not about web development but a Photoshop tutorial (my graphic design endeavors ended shortly after college never to return).
In the early days I focused exclusively on design and UX topics. That makes sense because I worked exclusively in web design for a few years, but I transitioned into a SharePoint career. From that time on, Microsoft topics would remain a steady fixture. I would intersperse topics around WordPress, reviews, tutorials, and general IT topics. Recently, like many others, my writing and thinking has shifted to topics in the AI space.
I wouldn’t only write on this blog. In fact, I started becoming more interested in writing for other publications in hopes it would raise my profile and drive traffic to my site. Below are just a few examples of me writing for other sites across different topics (unfortunately some sites I’ve written for have been taken offline). Several of these were on high-profile design and development publications.
- An Introduction to Mobile-First Media Queries on SitePoint (Ethan Marcotte even gave me a shoutout!)
- Mentoring as an Investment on Boxes and Arrows
- A Brief Overview On Responsive Navigation Patterns on Smashing Magazine
- How to Conduct Great User Interviews (eBook) on Optimal Workshop
This Blog by the Numbers
I thought it would be interesting to look at some data for this blog. Below is a graphic that shows the number of posts per year for the past 20 years. I started out very strongly and wrote consistently, but it dwindled over time as many others experienced. Even though my love of blogging never ceased, personal life events such as getting married, having children, and attending seven years of graduate school reduced my time to write here. There were some large gaps starting in 2020, and that is obviously due to the pandemic and all the upheaval that caused on all of our lives. I only wrote one post from 2020 to 2026.
What is interesting is that even though the posts became more infrequent, my desire to write longer, more substantive posts grew. That reflects in the number of words per posts over the years. Number of words obviously does not necessarily mean more thoughtful, but in my own writing I found I needed more words to express all the nuance I wanted to communicate.
Numbers alone can’t convey the story of this site, but it gives a window into my growth, ability, and interest to continue writing.
The Discipline of Writing
The blog itself is no stranger to sharing my thoughts on the discipline of writing for this blog. I’ve written about why blogs need more substantive content and on the other hand written about brevity and blogging. The important lesson I’ve learned is not necessarily stressing about what you write about, who reads it, or even the visual theme for your blog (which I’ve spent lots of time thinking about). The important part is that you exercise the discipline of writing.
The word discipline is very intentional. When you write in an intentional, consistent, and disciplined way, you get to see the benefits of that accumulation of thought. Whether it’s a public blog, a private journal—the important part is just doing it. It provides a rich window into your development whether personal or professional. I never look back on on this blog and wish I wrote less, and that thought has pushed me to rekindle my writing.
These days two things continue to threaten our ability to write intentionally. The first and a long-standing threat is a diminishing attention span brought on by several facets but social media stands out as prime offender. We have been trained into an aliterate posture—we have the ability to read but lack the desire and that extends to writing (for me more reading means more writing). I can attest to that atrophy over the years. The second is AI. I think the technology is incredible in many ways, but we can’t gloss over the potential downsides. One of those very real downsides is that we look to it to generate content and pull together our thoughts instead of taking the time to do so ourselves. When you’re trying to get a presentation out for a client or get thoughts down quickly, AI is fantastic for that. However, it cannot and should not replace our ability to write for ourselves in meaningful areas.
What’s Next?
I have no intention of taking down the site any time soon, and I want to practice what I just encouraged and take time to write more often. I often write when I’m excited and learning, and right now that is true for the first time in a long time. Even though I mentioned a downside from AI, I have recently seen what it can do positively and it has pushed me to continue writing. I even created an app with Claude Code to give me a better writing experience than WordPress currently provides. My hope is that along the way I improve as a writer and build a record for myself, but I hope that something at some point helps someone else out, even if only in a small way.
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