I can't believe this blog is 15 Years Old!

I missed the 15 year anniversary this February because I was busy with family visiting and then COVID-19 happened and next thing I knew it was the end of July and I was realizing just how long this site has been around. The crazy thing is that in my first blog post on this blog, I wasn’t even sure I’d stick with it. Yet here I am, with a blog that’s essentially been with me for my entire post-college life. While I started off with the generic Wordpress theme, 15 years ago in July I had the following theme:

Ramart Wordpress Theme

Boy had the world changed since then! We went from a world in which the blog was ascendant to one in which Twitter and Facebook rule and the mass public has abandoned blogs. They still mostly live as sections of publications - Forbes has a blog, for example - and other techies like me who appreciate being in control of where their thoughts live. Instead, because of the way people consume things we have tweet storms - which are pretty dumb - it should just be a tweet linking to a blog post if you’re going to write that much on a subject.

The subjects of my blog have morphed. Back in 2005 I had lots of blog posts about Linux and for a while I was getting a lot of views for my Linux reviews. Then I went through a huge photography phase. Nowadays it’s mostly about programming, electronics projects, and fatherhood. As of right now, here are the top posts and pages on the blog:

• Inherent Racism in Spanish Music - about how racism is culture-specific
• Using Digikam from the Point of View of Lightroom User - documenting how I moved from Lightroom to Digikam. This one is a perennial top post.
• Opening Adabox 015 - Come to Your Sensors - Yesterday’s post. I guess it has been VERY popular recently
• Unity 2D Game 5: Glitch Garden - A post about the game I created during my class about creating 2D games with Unity
• Moving to KDevelop for my larger Python Projects - Documenting how useful I find KDevelop for large Python projects
• Current Desktop Screenshots - A page with the current desktop backgrounds on my various computers
• A Tip for Reading Manga on the Kobo Clara HD - Sharing a little tip for those who want to use the Kobo Clara HD to read Manga
• An updated Digital Photography Workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee - a followup to the earlier post about how I changed my digital photography workflow
• Why No Apologies for the Asians? - this was an old one from 14 years ago so I actually had to go read it to remind myself what it was about. Basically how we seem to have uneven standards about who we’re willing to apologize to for racist transgressions
• EXIF, IPTC, XMP and Standards - some issues about photography metadata

It’ll be really interesting to see if I’m still running the blog in 15 years. I don’t see a reason not to do so, but the world is always changing so we’ll have to see what the future brings. That said, I do hope I continue to have a place to share my thoughts.