floor9.com has been blogging live from downtown Harrisburg Pennsylvania since the summer of 2002. Long before social media became what it is today — long before giants like Myspace, Digg, and Facebook have come and fallen — the site told the stories of floor9 and his coworkers as they made their way through the then-brand-new assortment of downtown nightlife venues. Downtown Harrisburg’s renaissance was framed, digitized, and published for the world to see.
The site was initially hand-coded HTML hosted on a friend’s Gentoo box. As site traffic grew and content grew more unwieldy, I progressed through several CMSes and web hosts. All of the content prior to 2005 is lost forever thanks a corrupt CMS eating its database. Since early 2005, the site has stuck with WordPress due to its phenomenal power and ease-of-use. And beginning in July 2010, the site is hosted via WordPress.com for less than a buck a month.
Site traffic varies wildly, from an all-time-high of just over 140,000 unique visitors during the 2009 Pennsylvania Budget Impasse / Metro Bank nightmare to several thousand per month when the blog is idle.
Although no one keeps any real history or archive of the evolution of social media in the midstate, floor9.com is one of the longest-running, still-updated blogs in Central PA. With no end in sight, floor9.com may very well become a lifelong journal of one guy’s venture through life. Check back in 50 years and see if I’m still here.
