A custom of this now nearly dormant weblog is a post at new year. The first such post that I could find was for 2002. Back then I was using Radio UserLand as my blogging platform. WordPress had yet to be invented. By 2002 I had already been blogging for a couple of years. One of the things that I regret now is that I wasn’t consistent in where I posted. I ran several blogs at the same time so a lot of what I posted back then was spread over several sites, a number of which were hosted, from which I never took a local copy of my data. A lesson to us all, but thank goodness for the WayBack machine. I now self-host my own WordPress installation.
Back in those days I invented a method of posting to a weblog via email and SMS. It was cutting edge, or so it felt all those years ago and it earn me a place in history as one of the pioneers of mobile blogging. You’re welcome Internet. I remember it was a lot of fun but came at the price of many long nights. I was active in the UserLand scripting community, most of whom were in the US, so the only way I could participate when everyone else was awake was to work into the small hours in the UK. Yes I had a day job too, and a young family, so I didn’t sleep much in those days. It was worth it though because it felt like I was part of something. I also gained attention for some of the people I respected most at the time, Dave Winer, without whom there wouldn’t have been a UserLand community, and Aaron Swartz. Take a look at this screen grab of one of my early weblogs that allowed anyone to post to my site via email. Dave and Aaron both posting to my blog on the same day! Aaron was only 15 at the time and had been working on the RDF/XML media type. He went on to do so many great things before his untimely death almost exactly a year ago. Also posting that day was Scott Lofteness, someone else who has achieved great things. I was in good company.
So as another new year starts and I reflect back on this weblog I notice that there has been a shift away from publishing to my own personal blog, and instead I post to different sites depending on the context or the medium. I use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and several other services that have fractionated where all my stuff goes. I can’t say yet whether this is a good or bad thing because these sites make it easy to create great content and I still have control of my data. But I do miss those late evenings and early mornings of the early days of blogging. These days however I need my sleep.
