20 years ago today I published the first post to this blog. It was a non-sequitur post because I didn't want my first post to be "is this thing on?" or similar. I had to look up what the Exchange worm I mentioned was, and it was probably MyDoom. That was a mass mailing worm, because this was before anti-virus was a routine component of email setups. I started a blog because I needed something to host on this new "web pages from your home directory" feature I was asked to create, and this was the first content on that project! I needed something to look at to prove it worked, and having external traffic to demonstrate along side made the demo even. In point of fact, this blog was originally hosted on a NetWare server running NetWare 5.1. On the internet and everything!
At first I used it a bit like how I later used Twitter, small posts sometimes multiple times a day. Micro-blogging in other words. So no wonder that went away once Twitter showed up. The original blog-software was on Blogger, back when they still had a "publish by FTP" feature. When blogger announced the death of FTP publishing, that was when I moved to this domain.
You can see what the original blog looked liked on Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20040609170419/http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/~riedesg/sysadmin1138/archive/2004_01_01_sysadmin.html Back then Blogger didn't create a page per blog-post unless you gave the post a title, which I mostly didn't. The embarrassing misspelling in the header stuck around for way too long.
My posting frequency tapered way off around 2011 for two reasons:
- I got a new job in the private sector, which meant that what I was working on was covered by confidentiality policies for the first time. Previously, everything I did could be revealed with the state version of a Freedom of Information Act filing. It took me quite a while to learn the art of talking about work while not talking about work.
- Twitter plus the death of Google Reader ended up moving my energies elsewhere.
If you take all of my blog posts and look at the middle post, that post is in 2007 somewhere; in the peak of blogging in general. This blog remains where I post my long form opinions! That isn't going to change any time soon.