In 2004, my friend and co-worker Jon installed some blogging software on his site and asked if I’d like to set up my own blog there. (Hard though it may be to believe, blogs weren’t free to operate back in the dark ages of 22 years ago … free blogging sites started to pop up, but didn’t really take off for several years, and most of them were ad-supported.) I named my new blog by patterning it on how Jon’s Blogulatiousness. Jon soon decided that blogging wasn’t for him, so it wasn’t long before he shuttered it, leaving mine the only active blog on the server. If I had any inkling I’d still be blogging in 2026, I assure you I’d have put a bit more thought into naming — and ease of pronunciation. But I didn’t, so we’re both stuck with my silly choice of name.
I’d been collecting online and offline quotations since the mid-80s, so I naturally thought it would make sense to focus my blogging efforts on sharing at least a few of those quotes. Some bloggers just naturally churn out brilliant and incisive essays on the issues of the day. Others post quick-hitting news or funny comments with links to other resources. I’m neither witty nor incisive, so I settled on the laziest way to fill the page: linking to a lot of those other sites run by far better writers, but including at least a few paragraphs from the linked article to entice my reader (or readers, on a good day) to click on the link and go read the entire original post.
Initially, the blog was kind of an adjunct to my quotation collection, but the blog soon ate the original quotes site … I’m ashamed to admit just how rarely I edit anything there these days.
Typical blog content is really an online incarnation of what used to be called “commonplace books” where a writer would collect information of interest that didn’t necessarily relate to the writer’s main interests or to anything else added to the book, as this summary explains:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.
I think that’s a pretty good description of most blogs, and certainly is true of Quotulatiousness.
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Twenty-one years of Quotulatiousness
- Twentieth anniversary
- Nineteenth anniversary
- Eighteenth anniversary
- Seventeenth anniversary
- Sixteenth anniversary
- Fifteenth anniversary
- Fourteenth anniversary
- Thirteenth anniversary
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon’s site — aren’t accessible any more. With the move to my own site, I switched from MovableType to self-hosted WordPress (currently running version 6.9.4).
