I first started this personal website just about 20 years ago. It began as a couple of html pages, and spent time as a Wordpress blog, a Tumblr page, and is now a static blog generated by Jekyll. Through that time, it had always just had my name, alexonsager.com. This year, I’m rebranding it to Invisible Parade.

Being online then

When I started this site I had just entered university, got my first MacBook, and was excited to become a full-fledged citizen of the internet. At the time, I thought it was cool to publish as much of yourself as possible. Tag yourself and your friends in the photos you take, scrobble the music you listen to, check in to the places you go, tweet your thoughts. Since I was broadcasting myself to the world, it made sense to put my name on my website. That’s how people would know me.

At the same time though, Daring Fireball was a cool site with the coolest name. Daring Fireball man, how do you top that?

Envious, I found a site that generates random adjective + noun combinations and hoped for inspiration. The second or third result I got was “invisible parade,” and I immediately loved the oxymoron. The whole point of a parade is to be seen by all of the people. What then, is the point of an invisible parade?

The name stuck in my head, and I think at one point I may have bought the .net. But I didn’t have anything to do with it, and eventually let it expire.

Being online now

It feels less in fashion to use your full name as a brand now. There is the risk of bad attention following you around, but also it’s just more useful to have a persona. There are literally a gazillion people online, so “hey I have a website” is not enough to make you interesting. You have to let people know people what you’re about, show some personality.

My real-name domain feels like showing up to a costume party with a name tag that just says “Hi, my name is Alex”. It doesn’t feel fun anymore!

The rebranding

On a whim I looked up the invisibleparade domain, and it was available. It felt right, so I nabbed it, and here we are. And it is kind of a perfect name for the site.

I’m creating this parade of posts, if you will, and I’m putting in a real effort to make it interesting and nice to look at. But who’s even looking at it? What is the point of an invisible parade, or an invisible blog?

Well, it’s fun! I like putting it together. And if anybody happens to stumble across it, I’ll be happy to show it off. So here’s to another 20 years of parading.