a milestone

This blog is now ten years old. A full decade. The first post has an official date of 8 May 2005, but I know that it's actually earlier than that. That's because when I first got into this blogging thing with Blogger, I was fooling around with some of the Blogger settings and managed to wipe out the original blog along with about a half dozen posts. Fortunately for me I still had all that content in a cache and thus reposted it all a second time. So when folks ask how old This Old Blog is (a.k.a. BlogBeebe) I just say a decade and then move on.

Some folks, like Kirk Tuck, look at a lot of posts over a long period of time and announce that they're trimming the posts back a bit because they're old and as a consequence they're a burden on moving forward. I look at This Old Blog as a living historical document that shows my attitudes and the times they were shaped in over the last 10 or so years. Are some (many to be honest) of them embarrassing? Obsolete? Sure. But that's due to the passing of time.

In a way, to understand me is to understand my blog.

The biggest problem with old posts is unfortunately stale links to referenced articles and photos. You can tell because there's just a lot of text and within the text references to images, especially screen shots. Clicking on old links takes you to empty pages. Oh well. That in itself is illustrative of the impermanence and overall fragility of the web. Many of those missing images were hosted in server space on my even earlier website at Geocities. Remember Geocities? I did that because in the very early days of Blogger, Blogger downsampled all images and they looked like crap. So I moved them off to my Geocities account and added a link in my Blogger posts back to them. But then Yahoo closed down Geocities and all those screen shots just went away. I backed up the Geocities site with the idea of rehosting and relinking, but I never did get around to that, and that's that. Oh well...

No, the blog exists as is, with only one deletion out of thousands of posts (read the post right before this one). This blog stands as a living monument to my past ten years living in this part of the internet, however incomplete that may seem to you. In a way it's living up to what a web log was originally meant to do, and that's be a digital recording of life about the world on the web. It's incomplete and certainly imperfect, a reflection of life itself.

Hail to This Old Blog. May the next 10 years be as interesting as the last.