10 Years of the candler blog

I don’t remember starting this website. I really don’t. What I remember, mostly, is learning web publishing while I had a decent amount of free time on my hands at one of my first jobs out of college. Once I figured out how to host my own blog, I transferred a bunch of my MySpace posts to my personal site and kept at it, writing reviews and observations regularly.

The candler blog was an idea that incubated for years. The original concept was as simple as it was lofty: people working in the film industry writing about film. Think Cahiers du Cinema meets Projections, but for my film school friends. I had planned on calling it just “The Candler,” and I worked through a few ideas to print it, like a newsletter, before giving up on it.

Until one day I just up and started the site. No urls for “The Candler” seemed available, so I added “blog” to the name, worked up a design incorporating a recent photo of mine, and just put the thing online. A full decade later, here it is, still going, at least in some fashion.

When I think on the impact this site has had on my life, I almost can’t believe it. It was through this site that I found my way into being an editor for Heeb Magazine, from there writing for a variety of different outlets. I’ve interviewed filmmakers and movie stars, I’ve covered film festivals and movie premieres. My writing here helped link me up with the team behind Fountain, the plain-text screenwriting syntax I played the smallest role in getting off the ground.

It was this site that opened the door to covering SXSW for me, which brought me to Austin a few times, giving me the confidence to actually leave NYC when the time came. So now I live in Texas, where I met my wife and set down roots.

It’s a strange thing. I’ve tried various advertising models on the site, and I’ve been paid for my freelance writing, yet I never found a way to make the site generate any meaningful income. I have worked in post-production all these years, maintaining (or trying to, at least) the candler blog through it all. This website has never been my livelihood, and yet it feels as though my career would be nothing without it.

For ten years this site has been my little plaything. To the readers who have been here this whole time, or have just showed up today: thank you for coming around to my little pocket of the web. You helped keep this little project going so many times, whether you knew it or not.

And so, it’s 2019. The web is certainly changing, but not so much that a simple blog can’t find a few readers. I’ll keep this thing going for as long as I can. I hope you’ll be back to see what I’m up to.