Caveat Lector

Two days ago, Caveat Lector turned five years old. That doesn’t make it an elder statesblog exactly, but five years is still a respectable age for a weblog.

Two thousand seven hundred thirty-one posts (give or take; I don’t know if that number includes the five I’ve got in various states of draft). A few hundred trackbacks, from the days when trackback wasn’t a spam vector. No comments. (Still.) No ads, no tip jars; blogging is my private vice, and I see no reason anyone but me should pay for it, and plenty of reasons they (for various values of “they”) shouldn’t. A semi-respectable Google PageRank of 6 (I’ve occasionally flirted with 7, but I can’t seem to keep it).

CavLec has outlasted four jobs, one master’s degree (from soup to nuts), one move (soon to be two), one blogging platform (seriously, does anybody use Movable Type any more who isn’t forced to?), at least three webhosts, and more blog-drama than I like to contemplate.

Putting things in perspective, however, CavLec is one-seventh the chronological length of my life, only five-eighths the length of my marriage, and a bit less than one-third the length of the relationship that includes my marriage. Hell, my tubal ligation is older than CavLec; that’s just the kind of stubborn old bag I am.

Rather to my dismay, CavLec has become far more of a professional blog than I ever imagined or wanted. (”Professional” in the sense of “engaging with professional issues,” not in the sense of “paid to blog,” because I’m not that last and don’t aim to be, either.) There’s a life-balance issue lurking there. I’ve spent too much time in the last couple years couch-potatoing at home because it’s just such a pain in the rear to go anywhere in the vicinity of Washington DC if one doesn’t drive. I’m hoping the move back to Madison will wake me up a bit, and get CavLec back to the usually-cheerful miscellaneous geeks-and-their-cats haven it used to be.

(The vacation from open-access wrangling has been nice, I must confess. I completely missed the latest Harnad-Velterop green-versus-gold exchange, and I couldn’t manage to be happier about that if I tried my level best.)

I ought to give the poor old thing a redesign for its birthday; it’s still, well, terribly rectangular and all. (Hello? The late ’90s are calling, and they want their squared-off visual aesthetic back.) I don’t want to ditch the William Morris entirely, but I think I can contrive something a bit more in touch with modern web design. Maybe when I get settled in Madison—though another project is hanging fire for that, and it really ought to get done first.

We’ll see. I can at least assert that scars and all, CavLec will keep its dusty little over-Latinated corner of the blogosphere open for business.