千里之行，始於足下

Every thousand mile kilometer journey still begins with a single 步

What you are looking at right now, is exactly that: a first step towards reclaiming my personal corner of the internet. A place to share my thoughts, document what I’m up to and links to things I think are interesting.

Truthfully, I have taken this initial step many times since I abandoned the last iteration circa 2017. A lot has changed since then, not just in regards to who I am or my circumstances, but also the internet as a whole has become unrecognisable to me:

Whenever I meet someone new these days, they will very likely ask me for my Instagram handle if they want to connect. It has become the de facto business card replacement if not a synonym for the “web” as a whole.

A single page with a single hyperlink, a paragraph of text and some short-form video content might be all you need, reader dear, but I’ve had big plans for my internetly abode from the very beginning.

The Origin of the Blooming Bridges

When I finally got the opportunity to leave Germany, I knew that special character, the umlaut in my family name, would cause all kinds of problems. So in order to make my name more palatable to the world stage, I simply anglicised it:

“Florian” being Latin for the “blooming one” and a “Brückner” being someone whose job involves either building, guarding or perhaps sleeping under bridges (To this day I still don’t know which one), combined make bloomingbridges. I thought it was very evocative and easy to remember at the time.

So when we were given the brief to create our online persona and build a personal website in a class on “online identity and self promotion” at university I leaned really hard into this metaphor: My first ever personal site would feature a suspension bridge in the footer, made up of twitter handles and the water below representing how often I’d interact with them.

The @bloomingbridges brand was all about forging, visualising and deepening connections that I’d make on twitter (aka online in 2009 speak) as well as in real life throughout my journey to become a Creative Technologist, which was the buzzword back around 2013 when I graduated top of my class from Digital Art & Technology at Plymouth University.

Barely anything mentioned in the above sentence is still around: My social media platform of choice was murdered, my alma mater changed its name back to University of Plymouth, everyone wants to be a User Experience Designer now and on top of that, the United Kingdom broke off the Eurasian tectonic plate and sunk into the Earth’s core or something (👋 .co.uk domain).

Bridge Construction Roadmap

This new iteration was heavily inspired by a simpler vision for the web, pioneered by the Gemini and Gopher communities. I would love nothing more than for this site to be as simple to maintain as it is to peruse.

It was built with Astro at its foundation, but ideally it would allow me to deploy to alternative protocols, such as the aforementioned. So, if you’re running a cool instance, I would love to hear from you!

As I keep adding more items to the project log, I will eventually need some sort of database to make sense of all of this data, but let’s cross that bridge when we get there ;)

Speaking of bridges. While I don’t think I can rebuild those collapsed blooming bridges of the twitter era, I have found a new home in Mastodon, specifically the welcoming Merveilles community of weirdos.