22nd blogiversary

An AI generated image of a birthday cake with two candles on it showing 22

It’s been 22 years to the day since I wrote my first blog post. Which is a very long time in technology.

Last year, I referred to the blogiversary as a ’21st-ish blogiversary’, mainly because I took a break from blogging for four years and all my pre-2018 where lost. However, I’ve been able to reinstate the first one, so you can read what 17 year old me had to say about starting a blog.

For the first few months of blogging, my posts were made using Blogger, which I’m almost surprised is still around. Google bought Blogger over 20 years ago, and hasn’t done much with it. It’s still there, and you can still create a new blog, but apart from a new responsive UI in 2020 it seems to have stagnated.

I switched to Movable Type in September 2002, and bought the neilturner.me.uk domain that I’m still using today. Over time, I switched web hosts a couple of times, but I’ve been with Bytemark for many years now.

In March 2011, I moved from Movable Type, which was becoming a commercial product, to Melody, a community fork. Alas, there just wasn’t much interest elsewhere in the blogosphere in either Movable Type or Melody, and so this was a short-term change. Just a couple of months later, I switched to WordPress, and have been using it for almost 13 years now. That’s longer than any of the other blogging systems that I have used in the past.

Over this past year, I have been trying to get back into blogging, and, since October, I have (for the most part) published a new blog post every other day. I’m enjoying blogging again and wish I’d re-started sooner, although at least with a 4 year break, there’s plenty to talk about. I still have plenty of ideas for future blog posts which should see me well into the spring. So, happy birthday blog – you’re looking better than you have done in years.

21st-ish blogiversary

Today marks 21 years since I started my blog, on the 14th January 2002. Back then, I was 17 years old, in the sixth form, a few months away from taking my A-levels and living at home with my parents.

Surprisingly, I managed to keep up with blogging regularly for 16 years, but gave it up due to a lack of time and a monumentally screwed up server upgrade that also wiped out my only backups.

So there weren’t any 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th blogiversaries, as I only restarted blogging last summer. Which means that this isn’t a ‘proper’ blogiversary. But I’m counting it anyway.

Nowadays, I still don’t have much time to blog – a combination of full-time work and being a parent – but I’m aiming to rustle up at least a few blog posts every month.

So, happy birthday blog. I would say ‘here’s to another 21 years’, but who knows what the Web will be like in 2044. And I’ll be nearly 60 years old by then.