Twenty Years of Blogging, One Necessary Overhaul

The number that finally made me do something was 68.

That’s how many categories this blog had. Not 68 active, organized categories. Sixty-eight fossil categories, most of them empty, some holding one post from 2011 that probably shouldn’t exist either. There were also 1,038 total posts, a lot of them in Indonesian, and a theme that hadn’t looked like me in years. The site was technically alive. It felt like a storage unit nobody had opened since 2014.

I’ve been running robinmalau.com since 2006. Twenty years. This blog has outlived more versions of the internet than most things I own.

It started in the RSS era. Google Reader. Feedburner. Blogrolls. Blogs were the social network back then — you subscribed to people, not platforms. I remember checking Feedburner and seeing one subscriber. I talked to myself about it for a few minutes. Genuinely. One person.

Then Twitter happened and most bloggers stopped. Facebook buried RSS. Google Reader shut down in 2013, which felt like a small funeral. Then the newsletter revival, Substack, everyone rediscovering long-form like they invented it. Through all of it the blog was still here. Sometimes neglected, sometimes active, but always accumulating.

When I moved to the US in 2018, the gap between the blog and who I was widened. The site was full of posts from a specific period of my life in Indonesia — running a music startup, playing in a hardcore band, writing about the music industry in Indonesian. None of that is irrelevant to who I am now. But it wasn’t readable in a way that made sense for someone landing on the site in 2026.

I kept avoiding one question: what is this blog actually for?

Sitting with it long enough, the answer was: an archive of creative phases. Not a portfolio. Not a personal brand exercise. A record of twenty years of making things and thinking out loud, across industries and countries and several very different eras of the internet. Once I had that answer, the cleanup was obvious. Everything else was just deciding what to actually do.

The project ran across five phases. The numbers say it faster than I can:

Phase one was the theme. The old one was generic, hadn’t been properly maintained, had broken mobile navigation, and gave no signal about who I am now. I built a custom theme from scratch — clean system font stack, no external font loading, fixed hero layout on the homepage, responsive mobile nav that actually works, blog index with a featured first post and a three-column grid. For context on why I’m particular about hosting and infrastructure, this post on moving to Pressable covers the thinking behind the stack.

Phase two was categories. Cutting from 68 to 7 sounds dramatic, but it mostly wasn’t — the majority were empty or held one post from an abandoned blogging phase nobody was reading anyway. The seven that remain: Music, Technology, Entrepreneurship, WordPress, Video, AI, Notes.

Phases three through five were the content, and this is where the work actually was. Going through 1,038 posts over twenty years is a strange experience. Like finding notebooks you forgot you kept. Some of it was genuinely good. A lot of it was dead links, tutorials for software nobody uses, news posts about Indonesian music industry events from 2012 that made sense in 2012. The decision framework I used was simple: does this post still say something, and is it in English? No to either — gone.

Fifty-seven Indonesian posts survived. Long enough, substantive enough to keep. Pieces about Puppen, the Indonesian music industry, living in Bali, the early startup scene. Translated and pushed back via the WordPress REST API, post by post.

By the time it was done the site had gone from that storage unit to something I’d actually send someone to.

A long-running personal website is an unusual thing to still have. Most people deleted theirs, let the domain lapse, or migrated everything to a platform. There’s something worth preserving in a continuous record that predates social media and will probably outlast most of the platforms I’m currently on. But it only has that value if someone actually goes in and decides what stays and what goes. Most people never do that part. The technical work is straightforward. The part that takes time is editorial — figuring out what version of yourself the archive should represent.

If your WordPress site has been sitting under years of accumulated content, stale categories, and a theme from a previous era — and you’ve been putting off dealing with it — that’s the kind of project I take on. Theme builds, content audits, category restructures, translation, performance work. Get in touch from via email if you want to talk through it.