December 13, 2025, marks the 29th anniversary of the day I bought the URL disquiet.com. On December 13, 1996, I submitted the paperwork to make the purchase. This involved a fax machine and a photocopy machine and a phone call. I’d had server space, accessible by http:// on nascent Internet (it was capitalized back then) browsers, for several years, but up until that point I’d never had — to borrow the formulation from Virginia Woolf and, in between, Michael Pollan — a URL of my own. I feel like it was all http:// back then, and I’m not certain when the move to https:// fully set in. The added “S” stands, I believe, for “security,” which may say something about the postdiluvian internet we now inhabit.
The word “blog” reportedly didn’t arrive until 1999, but a blog Disquiet.com was. Along the way, a friend of mine, the illustrator and designer Jorge Colombo, proposed I add datelines next to posts. Jorge commented that adding dates to posts would aid returning regular readers in situating themselves in the flow of information. Little did either of us know how much of the rest of our lives would involve situating ourselves in the flow of information.
Today, in 2025, a dateline may seem inherent in the concept of blogging, but before there were blogs there things becoming blogs, much as before “social media” there was “microblogging.” Things become things. That was the case in more ways than one with Disquiet.com. At first the website was just remnants of my server-stage web content, and then it was articles I first published elsewhere, notably in the music magazines of Tower Records (Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse), which I had, toward the close of 1996, just stopped working at as an editor in order to start a gig at a company of the sort that was then called a dot-com and is now called a startup. (Lest anyone jump to conclusions, I did not get rich, nor was that the expectation. It was a job.)
Much like with the adding of publication dates to individual posts, I stumbled upon the idea of posting directly to Disquiet.com. People would say things like, “Hey, great interview, when’s the next one?” And I’d say, “Well, first I need to get assigned a freelance article, and then it needs to get published” — this was 1996 and 1997, so I meant in print — “and then enough time needs to go by that I feel comfortable posting it online.” And eventually one of the people who asked this question of me must have said something like, “Hey, why don’t you just write, ya know, for Disquiet.com?” And so I did.
This was all being coded by hand, by the way. Disquiet.com continued to be all hand-coded HTML, including the eventual RSS feed, from 1996 until 2007, when I paid someone to port it all to WordPress. I think about this phase of my life a lot, and on the 13th of each December each year, if I have the time — as I have a bit of today, after a walk to the ocean and back — I jot down the memories. I’m interested to look back and see how details shift and are clarified and gain (and provide) context as the years go by.
I should mention that my pre-vanity-URL Internet server space had simply come along with the ISP (Internet Service Provider) subscription that enabled a dial-up connection in my apartment. The fact that the ISP subscription included server space says something about the sort of people who were using dial-up service at that time. Today, internet access doesn’t come with, let alone encourage, the use of personally identifiable space online; that change may say something as well, something about how the internet has transformed from a loose many-to-many system to an archipelago of commercial platforms. I avoided the word “blog” for a long time, enjoying being able to note, as a kind of honorary digital native, that my website preceded the word, so I was grandfathered in as something else, something less easily characterized. As time passed, however, a funny thing happened. I stopped disliking the word blog and started encouraging its use. More than ever, I think blogging is important. I think more people should have URLs of their own.
Next year will mark Disquiet.com’s 30th anniversary. Looks like we’ll have at least one live event in the San Francisco Bay Area to note it. Maybe some other activities, too. I never know with anniversaries if the lead up to or the time after is the “celebration zone,” so I guess I have roughly two years to have fun with.
