Xanga – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

In which I’ve been here a minute

November 30, 2019March 9, 2020 Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Sometime in 2004, while I was in graduate school working on getting my teacher’s license, a friend at a party suggested that a bunch of us start blogs on a site called Xanga. I had jumped into blogging a couple of times at a couple of different places but didn’t have anything live at that particular time, so I agreed, starting a site called Monkey Knife Fight. Monkey Knife Fight ended up lasting much longer than any of the other blogs my friends were running; its high points were being the top Google search result in the world for the phrase “Duck cock” and my wedding, where I literally logged into my blog on a laptop at our reception and let anyone who wanted to post a comment or a little written piece. I’m still in touch with a number of people who I would never have met had it not been for that blog, and it’s arguable that I would not be married to my wife had it never existed as well.

That blog died in 2009; the final post was a wordless picture of a five-year birthday candle posted on the five-year anniversary of its opening. I still have all of the posts saved on my computer and a couple of different cloud-based backups; some of them were preserved in Searching for Malumba as well.

Fast forward four years, roughly, and one of those same friends announces that it is time for all of us to start blogging again. The first iteration of infinitefreetime—the name was a joke, as I not only had a toddler in the house but I believe I was working at least two jobs as well– was actually at Xanga, which quickly killed itself soon after I started it, forcing me to reopen this account at WordPress, which is where the blog currently lives, six years and some change later.

And, as of this post, 3000 posts.

And, as of about another hundred words from now, a million words.

Ain’t none of those other folks around any more, damn them. More people I know IRL should be blogging.

Fun fact: this blog actually started in June of 2013, but the WordPress account it uses has been around since 2008. I got a single pageview on whatever site was created that day and then nothing for five years after that. I did get a nice little ten-year email from them last year, though.

By the by, here’s that millionth word:

Pants.

Because, well, obviously. Other than “fuck”, which seems a bit gauche, what else could it possibly be?

I first figured out that I was approaching a million words and 3000 posts, I dunno, a couple of months ago, and started trying to make them happen on the same exact post a couple of weeks ago. I have known what that millionth word was going to be for basically the entire time. I have a cat in my house who has been here for over two weeks and we’ve not named him yet. But hell if I don’t know immediately that if there is a chance for me to knowingly make pants the millionth word I write on my blog I’m sure as hell gonna do it.

I dunno. What the post was actually going to be has been in flux that entire time, including various plans for retrospectives or announcing new projects or maybe my 10 favorite posts from this site or a whole bunch of other things, but honestly I’m not feeling maudlin enough right now for any of that and the end of the year is coming soon anyway if I want to do retrospectives. So we’ll just use the post for this; to note that three thousandth post, and note that millionth word, and to note that it’s ridiculous how much of my life has been spent living on the Internet.

On to the next million, I suppose.

For the record

June 16, 2017 Luther M. Siler

There’s about to be another post right after this one, but this still needs to be said: yesterday was the closest this blog has ever gotten to the Previous Incarnation of my blogging, and my mid-2000s Xanga blog was like that all the time. I’m really not interested in using this blog like I used my previous one, which was a way to boil off stress and anger from the Bush administration so that it didn’t spill over into my actual life. And I would gladly name Bush President-for-Life rather than endure even another month of the evil fucking clowns we’ve got running everything now. So, yeah: hopefully I won’t be getting all 2005 around here all the time now, but that one was pretty much unavoidable.

On a year at WordPress

June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 Luther M. Siler20 Comments

I started blogging in… 2004, I think, when a grad school friend of mine suggested that a bunch of us start sites at Xanga. That blog lasted five years of mostly-daily publishing through the first three or four years and then a slow decline over the last year. A year and a half or so ago I got dragged back into a new Xanga site at the suggestion of a friend I’d met through the first blog, and then Xanga exploded and I moved operations over here.

In six or so years of blogging at Xanga, I got around a hundred and twenty thousand hits. Here’s the traffic from my first year at WordPress:

…so I’m at half the traffic of six years of blogging at another site, in a year. Traffic’s dropped way off from wintertime but that’s because I’ve invested less time into babysitting the site; it’s starting to climb back up again lately and I’m fine with that. All said, nearly sixty-five thousand hits in a year is not something that I feel like complaining about. It’s awesome.

What? You want more nerd stuff? Okay:

I am down to mostly third-world countries, Islamist theocracies, and Communist strongholds as far as countries that I haven’t seen traffic from yet. And Kosovo. Seriously, Kosovo, what the hell is your deal, what did I do to you? I’ve had so much traffic from the rest of Europe that I’m starting to wonder if WordPress thinks Kosovo is a country just for this map but actually interprets traffic from there as being from someplace else. And somebody hitting me up from Svalbard island would be nice, but I think there are only seeds and ice there and I don’t think seeds and ice use the Internet.

One more, while I’m sharing numbers:

That followers number staggers me, even as I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much– I had one random couple of days a few months ago where I inexplicably got almost a thousand page views in a day, but there are nowhere near three thousand people coming here even on a monthly basis, so I suspect the majority of those followers are bots or fly-bys. Still, though, when I look at most of the other blogs I read, three thousand seems like a lot for people who aren’t otherwise celebrities or well-known, and I’m certainly not that.

So, yeah. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this place over the last year but I think it’s been worth it and it’s been a lot of fun. We’ll see how the next year goes. Hopefully Kosovo will show up so I can start shooting for Liechtenstein and Vatican City. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

(Actually, let’s not make that a three-word thing: Seriously. Thanks for reading. Y’all are awesome. I mean it.)

On making friends

May 8, 2014 Luther M. Siler24 Comments

Non-WordPress folks can sit this one out, I guess, as it doesn’t have anything to do with you guys, and it’s totally a post about me making a mountain out of a molehill anyway.

I am– no, really, I’m devoting an entire post to this announcement– about to make a new folder in my bookmarks, and I’m going to put links to a bunch of y’all’s blogs in it.

Why am I doing this? Because while I throw a lot of Likes around on WordPress, what I’m really not doing very much is engaging with people who I actually know, where “know” means “interact with on my own blog.” I’m subbed to a bunch of you, but WordPress’ subscription reader absolutely sucks, and it means I’m missing posts that I would probably enjoy reading all the time. I’m an old-time Xanga dude, right? I got my start over there. It amazes me that with the huge array of ways in which WordPress is vastly superior to Xanga that it seems to suck so bad at basic community-building tools. The process of “keep track of what my friends were writing” was infinitely easier over there.

Don’t tell me about an RSS reader. I don’t RSS. I’ve tried it a couple of times and I can’t figure out why anyone would ever use it. Bookmarks and the “Open All” command it is.

So, yeah. If you’ve been subbed here forever, and you comment a lot, or if I recognize your name because you like every post, chances are I’ll be dumping you into that “Blogs to Go Read, Dammit” folder at some point or another, and you might actually start seeing me interacting with you at your own sites once in a while, because this is nonsense, and it’s high time that I start reading what y’all have to say more regularly than I do.

Alsothebook’soutthisweekendpleasebuymybookthisplugbroughttoyoubyfolgerscrystals.

Woo, pointless milestone!

November 19, 2013 Luther M. Siler6 Comments

200

If you don’t mind indulging me in a bit more blogwanking: this, this shit right here, is Infinitefreetime’s 200th post. Which is kind of ridiculous considering that this is only Infinitefreetime’s 169th day. I have somehow not only managed to only miss maybe a handful of days during the 24 weeks this blog has existed, I’ve had enough double- and triple-post days to manage to average just over eight posts a week. That’s madness.

My last “real” blog, which lived over at Xanga before Xanga killed itself, lasted just barely over five years. I remember, because one of the very last posts was an anniversary post. I was active over there, but not to the level I’ve been here– and while I don’t remember what my traffic was like on a day-t0-day basis over there, a thousand hits was a good month. I’ll likely crack three thousand this month and I’ve only been here since June, so either blogging has exploded in popularity (which seems unlikely), my writing has improved substantially (possible, but I doubt it’s responsible) or WordPress just pulls a shitton more traffic than Xanga ever did, which… well, that’s probably the most likely reason. Either way, I like the exposure, even if I’m aware that it’s not actually worth much of anything in the real world.

…

Yeah, and half an hour ago I had three different places I wanted to go after I finished those paragraphs, and right now I have no goddamn idea what any of them were. So… yay, happy blogiversary? I’m stuffed full of lasagna right now; it’s screwing up my brain. Maybe I was gonna post about how awesome lasagna is. Sure.

(Thanks for reading. Assuming you’re real and not some sort of WordPress SEO-bot.)