Dustin M. Wax

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I started blogging on November 2nd of 2000 with a carefully crafted analysis of supreme court nominations by previous presidents, in response to anti-Nader campaigning that promised Nader supporters that their support would spell the end of abortion rights in the US. That post has been lost to history (and a bad webhosting service); the oldest post I still have (Sierra Club Goes Anti-Green) was written the following day, again as a defense of the Nader campaign.

2000 was the very dawn of the blogging era — as far as I know (or knew at the time), there was not yet such a thing as “blogging software”, and certainly nothing as elegant as WordPress. Over the years, this blog (originally called “One Man’s Opinion” until that issue with the bad webhosting service allowed my domain to slip away from me) has moved from a collection of hand-coded HTML pages (what a PAIN!) to Bloxsom to Pivot to Drupal and finally to WordPress as of earlier this year. From the beginning, it’s been not just a place to express myself but also a way to explore the latest web technologies, from early third-party commenting and blogrolling services to today’s Twitter integration and WordPress themes and plug-ins. Along the way I’ve learned basic web design principles, a smattering of Javascript and PHP, and of course HTML 4 and CSS.

By 2007 I was blogging professionally, first at Lifehack.org and then for a number of big sites as either a some-time contributor or a guest writer. In 2005 I teamed up with a bunch of other young anthropologists to launch one of the first anthropology-focused blogs, Savage Minds, which has become a major destination for anthropology on the Web. In 2008 I launched The Writer’s Technology Companion, still a proud accomplishment although I haven’t kept it up as well as I had originally hoped. But it is this blog — including all the original content (except that very first post) from One Man’s Opinion and from my sex and gender blog ThinkNaughty (also lost in the aforementioned bad webhost incident) — that has remained my main blog, even when — as has definitely been the case this year — I’ve been too busy and/or distracted to post.

This year has seen tremendous changes for me. First, my freelance writing career took off in a way I’d never expected — and I discovered that I really wasn’t cut out for the demands of a successful freelance writing career. Then, just when it seemed I couldn’t bear it any more, I was offered my current position as the registrar of the UNLV Barrick Museum, allowing me to give up the freelancing entirely and return to two things I’m deeply passionate about: anthropology and museums. What that means for my future blogging I still haven’t determined — on one hand, I should (in theory) have a lot more time to post; on the other, I haven’t quite figured out what to post about.

But after 10 years, I’ve learned that if I wait long enough, there’s always something I feel strongly enough about to get me posting again. So, here’s looking forward to the next decade of blogging!