It’s difficult, in retrospect, to work out precisely when this website actually started: According to some emails from WordPress I’ve recently dug up, it seems my account with them may have been created as early as July 2015, but I didn’t actually publish my first proper post until March 2016. I have settled on 5th October as the anniversary date as it is the publication date listed for the About page, as well as the earliest date for which any site views are recorded.*

This was far from my first attempt at building a website for myself: That summer I had launched Homework Direct, itself the successor to a different website started in July 2012, and I have a dim memory of working with a school friend in 2009-10 to set up an online magazine, though that never got anywhere. Thinking even further back to the mid-noughties, I have still fainter recollections of two different instances where I experimented with simple blogs, but those definitely didn’t get published either.

I can’t quite remember my original motivation for creating the blog. It may be that I had just started at Wilberforce College, leaving behind my prior social group and taking a while to establish a new one, so it wouldn’t always be possible to discuss my observations on various phenomena in person. That would have been a little redundant by March, though. More likely it was prompted by a vague sense of building one’s “brand”. I’d never fancied (and still don’t) joining Facebook or Twitter, deciding instead that having an actual website of my own would better suit my needs. The next question was which site-builder to use. I had, that summer and last, experimented with coding pages directly in HTML but it proved too much of a faff. Blogspot and Livejournal already looked a bit primitive, antiquated and amateur. Tumblr was too unstable and had too many undesirable political connotations. I couldn’t get to grips with Weebly or Squarespace no matter how much they were advertised. I didn’t learn about Medium until years later. If I was starting ten years later (and perhaps if I was ten years younger) I could well have ended up on Substack. WordPress was recommended to me by every friend and family member with webmaster experience. I suppose I could have used Wix, on which Homework Direct was already done, but it’s lucky I didn’t as I quickly came to find that service inferior. Another item to consider was the name and domain. I long had my mind set on HomeworkDirect.Com only to see it taken at the last minute by the Uncle Ben’s rice company. I ended up going for HomeworkDirect.UK instead. When it came to my personal blog I was a little annoyed to find that all the Robin Taylor domains were taken. At first I was tempted to dismiss this as the inevitable fate of all names by that point. I then tried searching for the names of my acquaintances at Wilberforce, then those I remembered from secondary and even primary school, to discover that the vast majority of them did not suffer the same problem. I had to include my middle name to find a unique domain, at the expense of the URL being a bit long. The Robin Stanley Taylor domains were all available. I settled on the one I wanted** and even designed stationery with it included, but held off actually registering it until two years later as I wanted to avoid the additional expense of a second subscription until I was sure the blog would be a long-term commitment.

Late in 2015 I became a low-level public officeholder when a senior faculty member at the college nominated me*** to be on the student council. I found myself in the position of secretary and had the role of presenting triannual reports on the reports on the council’s activities to the college corporation. That gave me some material that seemed vaguely blog-worthy. There were also visits by famous faces to the college and days out (such as university open days, or that tour of medieval Beverley) to provide extra fodder. The blog was vague enough that could write on any number of miscellaneous interests, so I discussed politics and public events a fair amount (my principal hobby at the time), such as Harold Wilson’s centenary or the recall of the National Assembly for Wales over the Tata Steel crisis. These two topic areas could overlap when Wilberforce had a political visitor, such as the Lord Norton of Louth in late 2016. At the University of Hull I became a school and then subject representative in the student union. I was a much smaller fish in this much larger pond and, although I still went to a lot of meetings, I never had anything interesting to say at them and posts about them got almost no views. More engaging were the posts I wrote about guest lecturers — such as Paul Danahar and Terence Casey. One of my most-read articles is about my time at The Lawns in Cottingham.

The COVID lockdowns put an end to campus activity anyway, so I turned almost entirely to other matters. By this point I was blogging regularly about heraldry in its various aspects, which accounts for a sizeable proportion of my posts. One upside to the lockdowns was proliferation of organisations doing free virtual conferences and lectures, often with very little scrutiny of whom they let in. I attended far more of these than I ever got around to writing up. In the years after COVID the supply of these has slowly dried up with many organisations going back to in-person events and/or restricting them to paying members. Even so, I still get to attend a handful of these each year.

As time has gone on I have drifted into standard political analyses a lot, covering both the dignified and the efficient aspect of the constitution. I got onto a particular roll with this in the closing years of the former reign and across the slow beginning of the current one. This occasionally gets recognition from high up, as when David Torrance quoted my critique of Parliamentary guidance around dissolution in 2024.

While all this is going on, I’m not really sure what to do with Homework Direct. Initially it was my main focus (which partly explains the sloth of activity on the blog) but by September 2016 I had uploaded everything I could find which fit the format and there was little more to do. There have been very few updates since then and visitor activity is low compared to the main blog. The most significant development was in August 2022 when Wix announce a hiking of the domain registration price. I was tempted to close the project completely at this point, but I ultimately decided to migrate**** it to WordPress along with everything else. A month earlier I had created a new website for Paull Holme Tower, but that is stuck in a frozen state too.

I have mentioned before the steady growth of readership on this site. From 1st January to 4th October this year I have achieved a total of 3716 views, a mean of 13.4 per day. If this trend continues for the remaining 88 days of this year I will end up just shy of 4900 views, which will exceed last year’s record but still fall a little short of my target. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here: As it says on the about page, this blog is run as a hobby not as a business, and even with an audience much larger than this it wouldn’t occur to me to put up paywalls or sell merchandise. It’s just nice to know that my contributions are appreciated.

I don’t really know what the future holds. I suppose I shall just keep on blogging about events in the news, political and royal trivia, book and television reviews, trains, buildings and virtual lectures until I physically or mentally can’t anymore, or until the hosting gets too expensive, or until WordPress shuts down or becomes unworkable, or too expensive, or until I say something controversial that gets me censured, or until the free internet is ended. Instead of planning for the future, this little exercise got me more interested in the past: There have been multiple occasions over the past ten years in which I had meant to put out an article but never got around to writing it, or wrote much of it but never got it finished, or even finished it but never published. I’m considering whether it would be worth now going back around to fill in some of the gaps, particularly for the early years where it currently looks a bit threadbare. I’m sure my student council report for the Michaelmas term in 2015 will prove super fascinating to all!

FOOTNOTES

*Most of the views are from Britain, and these are almost certainly from me checking my own site to make sure it worked, but there was also one from the United States. I wonder how they found me so soon?

**RobinStanleyTaylor.Com was also available but ‘.Net felt somehow more apposite.

***I didn’t actually meet her until some time afterwards and I never found out what was the procedure for choosing candidates.

****When I say “migrate”, I really mean a day of frantic copying and pasting.