Primordial Article

by Joshua Deal

May 15, 2025

I've wanted to create my own blog for a couple of years. Now, I've finally gone and done it. So, what took me so long?

For some bizarre reason, building a nice blogging website from the ground up has always been more important to me than writing the actual content of said site. If my priorities were in normal person order, I would have never had any problem with settling for a nice WordPress site or using someone else's blogging platform. But my interest was never in the contents of the blog itself, even while acknowledging that said contents are arguably much more important. The writing contents comprise the meat and potatoes of any such platform. Apparently, I never really cared much for meat and potatoes.

I wanted to craft my own website-one that would stand as a testament to my abilities as a developer and display at least a little bit of technical competence. My type-B personality restrained me from achieving this for years.

But that really doesn't matter anymore, because now I've gone and done it. I've jerry-rigged together some PHP code and ended up with a platform that I think looks quite nice. The meat and potatoes are much nicer with a plate to put them on. I've even made a GitHub repository for this plate.

Now I can finally threaten the literate online world through expressing the horrid contents of my mind.

I intend to write things-hopefully words in sentences in some sort of human language with some sort of coherence and meaning to someone. But this standard is not guaranteed to be upheld to the fullest extent. In the words of the great American comic, Steve Martin: "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper."

I'd explicitly write a bit about myself in an introduction of sorts, but I really don't see that sort of thing as ever being a necessity. I like to give more credit to the human mind's amazing ability to figure things out and draw conclusion from new information than I think the kinds of people who write those sorts of things do. I trust that in time, if you desire to do so, you'll have no problem figuring out the type of person I am and the sort of shenanigans I get up to. I'm really not very covert at all.

And for the record, I do in fact enjoy long walks on the beach.

I do genuinely hope that the contents of this blog will be meaningful and valuable to at least a handful of people. Otherwise, I hope it will be meaningful to at least myself. You don't see a lot of homemade, independent blogs anymore, they're a dying breed.

The origins of the codebase that became this blog are surprisingly kind of scummy. I've observed plenty of online AdSenes farms in my day-sites comprised of low-quality content that exist solely for the purpose of attracting traffic to display ads to and generate revenue with relatively little effort. These sites are no good because they act to lessen the overall quality of information online. If you've ever tried to look something up that should have been rather rudimentary to find out with a simple internet search, but instead you found yourself being bogged down with tens of poorly written, unhelpful, samey articles that are packed full of advertisements and affiliate links, then you're familiar with the concept of an AdSense farm.

The existence of such sites made me curious. Their persistence implies that someone somewhere is benefiting from them, so I figured I ought to try my hand at making one. Why not take my slice of the pie?

The project began with me researching marketing. I stumbled my way into the bizarre world of search engine optimization-a truly strange field that insists on working tirelessly to degrade and ruin the quality of your internet search results in favor of financial gains. There, I learned about keyword stuffing and backlink purchasing. In no time, I was well on my way to creating a new nothing of a webpage-more noise among the endless, ever degrading noise that comprises the modern web. Just another lane closure and car accident on the information superhighway.

Mere HTML propped up by a bit of CSS was not going to do the trick. I needed something more extensible. Something that could easily be reprised and rebranded repetitively. If I really wanted to maximize financial profits, I'd need to replicate this site for different niches. Therefore, I built a platform. (Perhaps template is a more accurate word for what I made, but platform sounds more dramatic to me.) Something that I could reuse for different contexts. I could create one site dedicated to houseplant care and gardening, and another for computer science and programming. I wanted to cast my net as widely as possible.

As for our meat and potatoes, generative AI is really great for popping out milquetoast articles about almost anything. Just prompt ChatGPT for an SEO-conscious article about preventative measures to take to stop chlorophyll-consuming pests from taking root amongst your houseplants, and you'll see what I mean.

Next, it's just a matter of picking an advertising service and getting approved. But in most cases, to do this you'll need to already have a decent backlog of articles and inflow of traffic. The inflow of traffic part proved to be a bottleneck for me because I currently lack the practical marketing knowledge to pull this off, and I don't really have a strong desire to invest much time and energy into obtaining it. Like I said, type-B.

If you were really committed to this hustle, it would be a good idea to maintain a social media front for each of your sites. This is a great way to obtain traffic and build brand awareness. I really didn't want to do this though. I'm not fond of social media in the slightest.

I started to get some moral qualms about this project. As stated before, it feels pretty scummy. I liked the idea of making money online, but I didn't like the idea of doing so without providing any real beneficial service to anyone. Instead, I would be providing a minor inconvenience. Debating myself over this issue hindered my productivity. I decided that in the worst-case scenario, when all is said and done, I would at least have this nice template/platform that I could easily convert into a blog or something of the like. The scummy feeling never subsided, and thus, the project began winding down. After around two months of rather indiligent effort, I finally took my sites offline.

Then it finally occurred to me. I remembered the blog I had wanted to create years ago. And now, here we are. I'm writing it. Nobody's reading it. Crazy how things work out.

As I'm writing this, it is coming to my attention that my shorts are on backwards. This is a rather disturbing realization considering just how long I have been wearing them. Never dress yourself in the dark.