Thom’s Place 4 Well Whatever…
Thoughts, opinions and whatever from Hawai’i. This is TP4WW — a personal blog that ran from April 2009 to the summer of 2012, written by Thom from O’ahu, and built almost entirely out of the conversation that happened underneath the posts.
There was never a business plan here. The earliest tagline said it plainly: “From Hawaii, my thoughts and opinions on whatever I want to talk about.” Later it was shortened to “Thoughts, Opinions and Whatever from Hawai’i”, which is about as accurate a description of a personal blog as anyone has managed. Some days that meant a photograph of a parade on Kalakaua Avenue. Some days it meant a silly online quiz. Some days it meant a haiku about frustration, or a rant about a florist, or a tsunami warning that everybody on the island was watching at the same time.
What this blog actually was
If you came to TP4WW in 2010 and looked at the front page, you would have seen eight or nine posts stacked up over a few days, each with a comment count next to it, and most of those numbers were in the twenties and thirties. That was the point. This was a blog that measured itself in comments rather than in traffic. The sidebar carried a leaderboard of the site’s most frequent commenters, updated month by month, and a running contest that gave away a gift certificate to whoever left the thousandth comment of the month.
The posts themselves were short by modern standards — a picture, a paragraph, a question thrown back at the reader. What made them work was that a few dozen people showed up every single day to answer.
The pace set by a reply
The comment count was not merely a score beside each post. It was the trace of a conversation that gave the front page its rhythm. A short entry opened the door, but replies kept it open: one reader answered the question, another picked up a detail, and a third returned to the exchange. That made the post less like a finished column and more like the first turn in a discussion. Its value accumulated after publication, in the part supplied by returning readers.
That arrangement also changed the working day. Posting was only one piece of the routine. Reading replies, answering them, following names to their own pages and leaving a thoughtful comment made a circuit that had to be renewed. The daily pace came from reciprocity rather than a publishing calendar. A quiet morning on one site could be filled by conversation on another, and a familiar name carried the expectation that somebody would cross the path in the other direction.
This is why the gradual slowing matters more than the number of surviving entries. Once the circuit thinned, each post had to do more work alone, and the light, frequent format lost the company that made it feel substantial. Read in that light, the note that became the final post is not only an ending. It is the point where the conversation’s daily pace could no longer fit around everything else.
The recurring features
Nearly every post belonged to a weekly or monthly feature, most of them shared across a whole ring of blogs that all played the same games on the same days. Monday brought the question memes and the music posts. Tuesday brought the photographs. Wednesday brought haiku. Friday brought Aloha Friday, and the weekend brought reflections and scenic shots.
Two of those features were hosted here rather than played here:
- The Muffed Target — a weekly photo meme built entirely out of the pictures you would normally delete. It was handed over to this blog in August 2010 by the blogger who created it, and the changeover post still carries the rules verbatim.
- Portrait of Words — a monthly writing challenge. Five categories of photo prompt went up once a month, and anyone who fancied it built a story out of them. It was retired at the end of 2010 for lack of players, and offered to anyone who wanted to take it on.
Alongside those sat Weekend Reflections, which ran past its hundredth week here, and a long list of others: Sunday Stealing, Monday Mayhem, Musical Monday, Thursday Theme Song, Thursday Thunks, Sensational Haiku Wednesday, Saturday 9, Fun Monday, Faces of the Week, 12 Strangers, Flash 55, Microfiction Monday, Three Word Thursday, Small World Saturday and Thematic Photographic.
Hawai’i, in the ordinary sense
This was never a travel blog. It was a blog that happened to be written from Honolulu, which is a different thing. The island shows up the way it shows up in anybody’s life: the bus, the flowers in the yard, aircraft over the harbour, the University of Hawai’i football result, the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo every spring, and a steady drip of Hawaiian words dropped into English sentences without translation — aloha, mahalo, hau’oli, and the sign-off that closed every single post here for three years.
If you want those words properly, rather than the way a blog uses them, the Hawaiian dictionaries at Wehewehe and the Hawaiian-language collection at Ulukau are the places to go.
How it ended
It ended the way most personal blogs of that era ended: not with a decision, but with a drift. Posting slowed through 2011. The conversation moved to other places. The last post went up on 8 July 2012 — a straightforward note saying life had got busy and the blog was going on a break. Nothing followed it.
What you are reading is a restoration of that blog: its pages, its features, its structure and its voice, rebuilt at the addresses they lived at. The comment threads are not here, because those were other people’s words, and neither is the contact form, because there is no longer anyone at the other end of it.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou