20 years of blogging...

On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog. I then proceeded to “back fill” the blog with various things that had either been posted before in other places or had been laying around waiting for me to have somewhere to put them. This is why although the blog began in 2003 the archives go back to 1992.

What I said on the 10th anniversary of this blog is still apt:

Things have changed quite a lot since then, both in terms of blogging and my life. Back then blogs were hot, there was lots of buzz around them and a lot of the things I wrote were designed to help connect my blog to the blogs of others (usually others that I perceived as having lots of readers in the hope of attracting readers to my blog). I like to think that the best things I wrote back then were the things that were more technical and less attention seeking and once I decided to stop trying to attract readers and simply write, the readers started to come. Now I only write technical stuff either for users of my Server Framework or as notes to my future self. I tend to view my blogs and my source code archive as ‘my spell books’; the reference material that helps me be better at what I do for a living. Whilst I can’t publish all of the code that I have I can at least put some of my thoughts up here for people to pull apart. Since I often work alone it’s a way for me to get feedback from a technical audience. It doesn’t often work but when it does it works well.

The blog is now generated by Hugo and was updated at the start of March this year. It’s now a slightly more modern design and is easier to view from mobile devices. You can see the various changes in style over at The Wayback Machine.

I am starting to blog more, at least at the moment. It’s easier with Hugo and my git push deployment. I realised that my blog posts are easier to search through than the pile of notes on my desk and so they’re a more efficient way of recording my technical thoughts and mistakes.

I hope that I’ll still be blogging 10 years from now. Who knows. Thank you for reading and taking part.