Twenty years of writing on my website

On this day twenty years ago I wrote the first entry in my online journal. In the intervening two decades I’ve written a further 2,817 entries.

I am now fifty years old, which means I’ve been blogging for two fifths of my lifetime.

My website has actually been around for longer than twenty years, but its early incarnations had no blog. That all changed when I relaunched the site on September 30th, 2001.

I wrote at the time:

I’m not quite sure what I will be saying here over the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Honestly I still feel like that.

I think it’s safe to assume an “anything goes” attitude for what I post here. Being a web developer, there’s bound to be lots of geeky, techy stuff but I also want a place where I can rant and rave about life in general.

That’s been pretty true, although I feel that maybe there’s been too much geeky stuff and not enough about everything else in my life.

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. Hopefully, I’ll be updating the journal on a daily basis.

I made no promises but I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Many’s the blogger who has let the weeds grow over their websites as they were lured by the siren song of centralised social networks. I’m glad that I’ve managed to avoid that fate. It feels good to look back on twenty years of updates posted on my own domain.

Anyway, let’s see what happens. I hope you’ll like it.

I hope you still like it.

Here are some of my handpicked highlights from the past twenty years of blogging:

• Hyperdrive, April 20th, 2007

  Last night in San Francisco.

• Design doing, November 11, 2007

  The opposite of design thinking.

• Iron Man and me, December 1st, 2008

  The story of how one of my Flickr pictures came to be used in a Hollywood movie.

• Seams, May 12th, 2014

  There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

• Web! What is it good for?, May 28th, 2015

  Not absolutely nothing, but not absolutely everything either.

• Split, April 10th, 2019

  Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.

Terence Eden’s Blog

A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.

Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.

No one is policing this.

Robin Rendle — Good and useful writing

The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.

WriteFreely

I hadn’t come across this before: a barebones blogging tool with built-in fediverse support—neat!

Blogroll | Max Böck

A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow.

(Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.)

Paper Website: Create a Website Right From Your Notebook

This is an intriguing idea for a content management system: write words on paper and then take a picture of the page. Artisinal retro vintage blogging.