Today is the 15th anniversary of this blog. Â As most of you know, 15 years in technology is forever. Â 15 years on the web is even more so. Â Here are a few highlights to give you a perspective:
- First post dates back to October 26th 2001. Â It wasn’t my first blog post ever. Â It’s just that the earlier history wasn’t migrated into the current archives.
- Archives page provides access to posts of every month of every year, except April and May of 2009, which were lost during a major outage at a hosting company at the time.
- The blog survived a multitude of migrations between blogging applications and their versions (static HTML diary, Nucleous CMS, Blog:CMS, WordPress), design changes (a dozen or so WordPress themes), and hosting companies (from a home server to the current Amazon AWS setup).
- Way over 8,000 posts written. Â Hundreds of comments, pingbacks and trackbacks received. Â These varied across a large number of topics, anything from personal, work, technology, movies, photography, Cyprus, and more.
- Millions of page views. Â Hundreds of thousands of unique visitors.
- Millions of blocked SPAM comments. Â Millions of (mostly automated) attacks, varying from SQL injections and dictionary password attacks to a some more advanced techniques targeting particular pages or WordPress and its plugins vulnerabilities.
- A variety of content reorganizations – posts, pages, categories, tags, short codes, templates, plugins, widgets, links, etc.
- A variety of integrations – web services, social networks, automated postings, aggregations, etc.
- A variety of monetization options – from “this is not for profit”, to ad spaces, to contextual ads, to sponsored content.
Have a look at some versions saved by the Internet Archive, dating back to 2004.
So, what have I learned about blogging in the last 15 years? Â Quiet a bit, it turns out. Â Here are a few things that I think are important enough to share:
- If you don’t have your personal blog yet, go and start now. Â It’s well worth it!
- Make sure you own your content. Â Social networks come and go, and when they go, chances are, all your content goes with them.
- Don’t stress too much about the format, styling, and scheduling of your blogging. Â If you do it long enough, everything will change – the topics you write about, how much and how often you write about them, how your site looks, etc. Â Start somewhere and iterate.
- Don’t go crazy with features of your blogging platform. Â Sure, there are thousands of plugins and themes to choose from. Â But all of these change with time. Â When they go away, you will have to either support them yourself, move to newer alternatives, or loose them. Â Neither one of those options is pleasant.
- Things die. Â They disappear and then they are no more. Â That’s life. This happens. Â Don’t worry about it. Â Do your best and then move on.
- Have fun! Â It’s your personal place on the web after all. Â Try scheduled posts to get into the habit. Â Try planning to get a better idea of what you want to do. Â But if it doesn’t work or becomes too difficult, move on. Â As I said, it’s your personal place and you don’t owe anybody anything. Â Do it for yourself. Â Others will come and go.
Here is to the next 15 years! :)