Holy MOLY 9 YEARS!

[caption id=“attachment_6755” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] This blog was on the server on the right, the left is a server for Phi Sigma Pi[/caption]

Nine years ago today I started blogging using Wordpress.  I’d been blogging for a little bit before that on Tripod (and I’ve been copying those posts over to this blog, so that post might not appear to be the first one. Those are the posts that start with [1.0]) , but this was when I took blogging into my own hands. I just can’t believe it’s been that long - it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been blogging for that long.  The blog has moved from a server running Fedora Core 1 in my apartment in college to a server running BSD in my first apartment after marriage to being hosted on ServInt.

If you look at that post from nine years ago, you can see that a major concern of mine, even back then, was being able to avoid censorship. It’s a lesson many people continue to learn when they depend on others to provide their hosting. For example, back in July 2013:

“When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn’t be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, ‘Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.’ But a new search policy went into effect Thursday that excludes all adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines by disabling indexing of anything it tags as ‘adult.’ The policy effectively makes the content and 10 percent of Tumblr users completely invisible.” - Slasdot

I know not everyone has the money or the technical know-how to run their own computing resources, but perhaps it’s a reason for people to start learning again instead of considering their computers to be black boxes that bring them tweets, Facebook, and the rest of the net.

By my second post, I was already singing the praises of Wordpress and by my third post I was already writing poetry on here. (Something I haven’t done in a very long time) It’s actually kind of sad that the poem is still relevant today - in fact more than it was back then. The problems haven’t gone away.

It’s fun to take a look back and see how much the interface has changed. I remember nearly all of those.

I’ve gone back and forth on various subjects - I no longer post nearly as much on FLOSS software as I used to. Politics went from a strong focus to the background and made a resurgence in early 2013. Of course, I was years away from being able to write about fatherhood back then. I’ve also varied in how personal the blog has been. Overall, it’s been an amazing journey for me. I’ve been able to write and sort out my thoughts and feelings and I’ve been able to write posts that have helped others with technical issues. Assuming all this stuff - blogging, Wordpress, etc still exists in another nine years - it’ll be interesting to see how my writing has once again evolved.

Here are some graphs enumerating the posts I’ve made monthly and yearly. 2014 will show whether the upward trend is continuing or was just another blip like 2011. I started 2013 with lots of posts, but then it petered off because of life.

[caption id=“attachment_7716” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Monthly Graph of Posts[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_7717” align=“aligncenter” width=“475”] Yearly Graph of Posts[/caption]