For three months I've had two different versions of my SIFT blog battling it out with each other in the wild seas of the deep state controlled internet, each desperately trying to gain authentic hits in an endless stream of fake AI traffic, so I've been back to my original existential battle of purple vs. black.
My original www.frot.co.nz from 1998 was purple and that was a fairly controversial choice, with one website reviewer saying my site was a garish abomination that burned out his eyeballs and left him a gibbering wreck.
For my second version in 2000 I switched to the more subdued and conservative black. At that point black websites were less common than they are now, and it had a certain dark and stylish menace about it. I liked the look and after that I tended to stick with black websites from then on.
Over the past few months as I've been switching back and forth from cool looking black to wild looking purple, it's made me appreciate the differences more. Black is quite calming and works better as a backdrop to galleries of images. But purple stands out amongst so many colourless sites and really makes a bold statement. It says "This blog is purple".
I'm not sure which is "better" but I have to say after 25 years of black, the purple one is growing on me again. Both sites are slowly gaining more traffic, so I tried posting the same content on them both for a while to see what happened.
Here is a screenshot of my black SIFT blog with posts staring Jan 1 2025 (so only three months of posts). It is displayed here using the new FLOORP browser that I highly recommend, and which I use as my default desktop browser. It is a Japanese privacy fork of the Firefox browser available for both Windows and Linux (but not Android)
I've been directing the www.sift.co.nz URL at the black blog, but the purple blog has been getting a lot more hits, so I've decided to switch the URL back over to that instead.
Posting on two blogs is a bit of a pain in the arse, mainly because I keep noticing typos in my posts later on, and having to go back and fix them twice. So I'll continue posting on both up until the end of March, but then I'll go back to only posting on the purple blog from April the 1st.
So then, black or purple?... I've been wrestling with this life defining question for 27 years now and I still haven't resolved it. Maybe the answer is unknowable.
