I’ve been blogging for quite some time now. I’ve been doing it even before it was called “blogging”. I had my own website, a diary, and an online journal. I started, as many others, with static HTML files and a text editor. That’s how it used to be back than. Then I wrote a shell script to simplify a few things. Then I improved it. Then I re-wrote it in Perl, adding a few features on the way. Then I improved it more. Then I re-wrote it again. Then I found somebody else’s and modified it with my bits of code. Then I plugged in something else. Then I found another script for the picture gallery. Then I found another one… And it went on and on and on.
Then more and more people started having online diaries and software started to appear to make common tasks like editing text, inserting pictures, and linking to other pages easier. I’ve tried a few of those systems too.
Each time I was moving the archives of the previous diary forward. Or, at least, I tried to. There were times when I was too lazy, or when I didn’t care enough, or when I wanted to have a fresh start. Because of that, some entries are lost forever. But there are still plenty of others.
Looking at the archives of this blog, as they are now, the earliest entry dates back to October 26th, 2001. That’s 6 years ago.
Lots of things happened to this blog during this time. It did a few software changes and updates. It was redesigned a few times. The blogging style changed a few times as well. It was experimented on, broken, lost, and restored. But one thing never happened to it. It was never abolished, lost and forgotten, left to die and rot.
For the last 6 years there was not a single month when I haven’t written an entry for this blog. Not one. There were a few slow months with 1 or 2 or 3 entries. There were periods of high activity with more than 150 posts a month (look at the year 2005, for example). I’ve written a total of 3,842 posts which averages to 53 posts a month (3,842 posts divided by 72 months).
As far as I can see, this blog isn’t going to disappear any time soon. It runs on the best blogging engine out there (WordPress, but not the latest version yet). It got re-designed again recently. And there are more things to blog about than ever.
So, here is the toast, for a happy blogging birthday! :)