21 years ago today I wrote my first blog post. Did I think I’d still be writing all this time later? I’ve no idea to be honest. I’ve always had the impression my readership is small, and people who mostly know me in some manner, and I post to let them know what I’m up to in more detail than snippets of IRC conversation can capture. Or I write to make notes for myself (I frequently refer back to things I’ve documented here). I write less about my personal life than I used to, but I still occasionally feel the need to mark some event.

From a software PoV I started out with Blosxom, migrated to MovableType in 2008, ditched that, when the Open Source variant disappeared, for Jekyll in 2015 (when I also started putting it all in git). And have stuck there since. The static generator format works well for me, and I outsource comments to Disqus - I don’t get a lot, I can’t be bothered with the effort of trying to protect against spammers, and folk who don’t want to use it can easily email or poke me on the Fediverse. If I ever feel the need to move from Jekyll I’ll probably take a look at Hugo, but thankfully at present there’s no push factor to switch.

It’s interesting to look at my writing patterns over time. I obviously started keen, and peaked with 81 posts in 2006 (I’ve no idea how on earth that happened), while 2013 had only 2. Generally I write less when I’m busy, or stressed, or unhappy, so it’s kinda interesting to see how that lines up with various life events.

Blog posts over time

During that period I’ve lived in 10 different places (well, 10 different houses/flats, I think it’s only 6 different towns/cities), on 2 different continents, working at 6 different employers, as well as a period where I was doing my Masters in law. I’ve travelled around the world, made new friends, lost contact with folk, started a family. In short, I have lived, even if lots of it hasn’t made it to these pages.

At this point, do I see myself stopping? No, not really. I plan to still be around, like Flameeyes, to the end. Even if my posts are unlikely to hit the frequency from back when I started out.