Yes, it’s hard to believe but this is blog post #622 and just like that 20 years of blogging are complete. What is even more amazing is that I have NEVER missed a month and on average, I have published 2.6 blog posts a month.
One thing is to write consistently, but another important factor is that I luckily picked a blogging platform that is still around today. In technology, so many things have come and gone remember Posterous, Orkut, XTree, Telix, Friendster, and the list goes on and on. Or, the product may still be around but it’s past its prime – Hello, Skype!
So in 2004, when I decided to starting blogging I spun up a new server and noticed the web-hosting provider had an open-source blogging platform called b2/cafelog. Around this time some of the other notable blogging platforms were Blogger, Textpattern, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type. I was more keen on the open-source platforms since I was an early user of shareware and freeware from the 1990s. Matt Mullenweg forked b2/cafelog and talks about starting WordPress in this blog post. NERD ALERT – a fork is when a software developer take a copy of existing source code from one software package and starts independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. Since b2/cafelog was open-source this was completely legit.
So after moving to the new server, for the first several months I was into hand-crafting the HTML pages like a psycho but quickly started to play around with WordPress version 0.70. The first version I installed was version 1.2…and the rest was history. For many years, I maintained the server and WordPress installation myself but around 2017, I switched to the WordPress.com managed platform…I figured let WordPress deal with all the technical details and that would free me up to write blog posts.
People ask me why I blog and the answer I always used to give was to improve my grammar skills. Well, with the advent of ChatGPT you don’t really need to have good grammar skills anymore you can just type anything and the AI will make you sound like a PhD scholar. But, the real reason I blog is because it forces me to think about certain topics and it’s great to visit some of these blog posts years later to see how I feel about those topics now.
Of course, nowadays everyone is Vlogging on YouTube instead of text blogs. I’m not sure if this blog will continue for another 20 years, but I will keep hitting the “Publish” button for as long as I’m happy with the content I’m creating.
celestri - virtual home of manish jain 