10 years of Morrick.me

July 18, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In late June 2011, after some consideration, I decided it was time to register a domain and pay for a hosting service. Thanks to my friend Grant Hutchinson I was able to do just that, and after a few weeks spent customising and tweaking the WordPress theme I chose at the time (a rather old one, but sporting the kind of layout I wanted), on 18 July 2011 Morrick.me went officially online.

Morrick.me in November 2011

The home page of Morrick.me in November 2011, as retrieved from the WayBack Machine. My first WordPress theme was called Futurosity, and I had to customise a lot of it to meet my layout needs.

 

Article view on Morrick.me in 2011

And this is how a single article looked at the time.

Of course, I’ve been writing online for longer. My first ‘blog’ was an online journal on LiveJournal I started in March 2001, while my first tech-oriented blog officially began in February 2005, using a terrible blogging software called BlogWave Studio, and relying on the meagre Web space afforded by my .Mac account back then. Initially I wrote only in Italian (my mother tongue), but around 2007 I also started to add articles written in English, with the intent of reaching a much wider audience.

The 2005–2011 period was a bit chaotic for me. As soon as I discovered WordPress.com and the ability to just start a free blog without worrying about domain and hosting expenses, I thought it was a good idea to have two separate tech blogs, one in Italian, the other in English. This was done to better manage my output and to offer clean, separate feeds to my Italian-speaking readers and English-speaking readers.

But then in 2008 I launched System Folder, my (now sadly very occasionally updated) blog on vintage Macs and the classic Mac OS, written in English. And soon after I realised that maintaining these three blogs and writing consistently in all of them required too much of my time; and since none of these projects was making me any money, I needed to make some changes.

So, circa 2010, I decided to merge the Italian and English tech blogs, something that confused my audience initially, but admittedly made my life easier. Some took this merger and my closing down comments on the blog as a hostile gesture, and for a while views on my blog took a dive. For me it was a rite of passage, a necessary evil. After a while, things got better, but I still was dissatisfied with what I perceived as a sort of ‘online identity fragmentation’. The free version of WordPress was, and still is, a great option for starting a blog in the most painless way possible, but if you’re serious about your online presence, you’ll soon outgrow it and want a more flexible solution. A personal domain and a custom WordPress installation give you more freedom of movement.

That was my next step in mid-2011. Then, of course, I had to incorporate all the tech articles written between 2005 and the first half of 2011 in the new Morrick.me website.

The rest is ten years of more-or-less constant writing. Re-reading the first years of Morrick.me, it was clear that I had more time to dedicate to this space. For a while, the average number of posts (both in English and Italian) per month was around 12–15, now I feel I’ve had a productive streak if I reach 4–5 articles in a month. Things have certainly changed: not only have I got less time to write here due to an increase of my usual workload, but I also changed my focus over time, favouring more long-form pieces, fewer ‘linked-list’ articles, and fewer posts where I essentially write a one-paragraph commentary to someone else’s quote, if you know what I mean.

Also, as you can see from my current production, in recent times my focus has been revolving almost exclusively around user interfaces and user interface design. Mind you, it’s definitely not a new interest, but these past years I’ve noticed a general worsening in UI design, even and perhaps most notably from Apple, and that has given me a lot of material to mull over and subsequently share my observations on the matter.

Some trivia

The logo

Here’s the evolution of my identity logo over the years:

Evolution of the Morrick logo

 

The first post published on Morrick.me

Two opinionated choices

  1. The permalink URL structure of this blog is https://morrick.me/archives/[number]. Over time I’ve been routinely asked why I opted for this ‘cryptic’ structure instead of the more human-readable https://morrick.me/2021/07/18/[post-title]. The simple answer is that I prefer short URLs and I’m not a fan of URL shorteners.
  2. This website is http:// and not https://. It’s a deliberate choice. I know HTTPS is more secure, but for now I want this website to be accessible to the widest range of devices, of any vintage, and that means sticking to HTTP. I will switch to HTTPS only when I have no other choice. For your peace of mind, I think you can instruct browsers like Brave and Firefox to upgrade all connections to HTTPS.

The 10 most-read articles of all time

At the time of writing, they are:

  1. Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess, published 18 June 2021.
  2. The Macs Apple was selling in 1996, published 30 March 2016.
  3. Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2), published 14 February 2020.
  4. The gem Apple discontinued: the 11-inch MacBook Air, published 3 January 2019.
  5. Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth, published 19 October 2019.
  6. The reshaped Mac experience, published 31 January 2021.
  7. “The required disk cannot be found” error in iTunes, published 22 May 2011.
  8. Yes to everything, published 24 March 2020.
  9. A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard, published 17 February 2021.
  10. “Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture — an annotated transcription, published 13 April 2019.

I’m not surprised to see many recent articles in this Top 10, since most of them were linked on Hacker News, which is a very popular tech news feed. The Macs Apple was selling in 1996 was linked by none other than John Gruber, and at the time I had firsthand experience of what it means for your site to be ‘fireballed’, so I installed and configured the essential WP Super Cache plugin (with many thanks to Nick Heer for the assistance).

I am rather surprised to see a 10-year-old article reach №7 in this hit parade, though. I guess that “The required disk cannot be found” has been a very popular and frustrating iTunes error.

I’m also a bit surprised to see that article about the 11-inch MacBook Air gain so much attention. It keeps receiving views on a daily basis even today. But I’m glad: that MacBook Air has become one of my favourite Apple laptops of all time. (The 12-inch PowerBook G4 will always be number one for me, by the way).

Some of my favourite articles

In no particular order. Consider this a sort of mini-tour of my archives:

  1. The whole Et Cetera category on this site, with articles that aren’t necessarily related to tech. See for example the From the lost drawer mini-series: 
  2. Ten years gone, published 21 March 2011.
  3. Books are bricks — important ones, published 28 May 2010.
  4. 40 years of Apple: some personal moments, published 3 April 2016.
  5. In March 2020 I carried out a time-consuming but exciting task: I decided to provide transcriptions of some of the interviews featured in a documentary series, The Machine that Changed the World, that aired in 1992 (for more details about this documentary, see this article by Andy Baio):
  6. Two articles on the first-generation iPad, published in May 2018: 
  7. A couple of articles on skeuomorphism: 
  8. On Mac OS vs iOS: 
  9. I’ve written a lot about the iPad and tablet computing, but this is perhaps my favourite article on the subject: 
  10. My series of observations on other, non-Apple platforms and devices: 

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of other stuff, but wading through a total of 16 years’ worth of articles can be rather daunting. Feel free to explore further starting from the Archives page, if you like.

Thank you

In its ten years of existence, Morrick.me has accumulated a total of views that a high-profile tech blog or website probably makes in a month or even in a week, nonetheless I wanted to thank every person who has decided to stop by over time. From the occasional visitor (those who follow a link to one of my articles, read the article, then disappear — I call them ‘hit and run’ visitors), to those who have stuck around all this time, to those who regularly read what I write, and especially to those who have shown appreciation either by letting me know via email or Twitter, or by sharing my articles with their (wider) audience.

On two particularly nasty occasions I was feeling so low that I went very close to giving up with tech writing altogether. So, a heartfelt thank you to all the people who have been supportive when times were especially hard. You know who you are.

Cheers!

The Author

Writer. Translator. Mac consultant. Enthusiast photographer. • If you like what I write, please consider supporting my writing by purchasing my short stories, Minigrooves or by making a donation. Thank you!