null program Turns Two Years Old

This website/blog turns two years old today. That's right, the first post was on September 1, 2007. This also happens to be the 100th post! Woo! Which means I have nearly kept up with my original one post per week planned average (104 would put me on schedule).

The site has evolved a bit in that time. Two years ago I was using vanilla blosxom (I've since hacked it up), no comments, no portrait (portraits increase reader trust), simpler logo, no color, no RSS (it was there, but I wasn't linking it), crappy index, no features but this blog and the "projects" section, no Creative Commons license (but I've always had the other simple copyleft statement), no lisp, and only one permalink per post. Since I started this site I lived in three different US states, had two different jobs, bought two computers, bought a car, adopted a cat, learned several programming languages, graduated with a bachelor's degree, had major surgery, and got married.

I've tried to make all my posts more than a trivial "hey, check this link out", and instead have some real content for each one. Thanks to this, if you concatenate all the posts together it's long enough to be a short book (about 170 pages). And, this blog is 100% Free Culture. All text and images are public domain or under a Free license (and none of that non-commercial-only crap). So I — or anyone — could easily publish it as a book. (Ha! As if anyone would buy it!) And I do maintain another completely separate blog, with a (currently) higher post frequency, under a pseudonym (so I don't get myself into trouble), which is why I won't tell you what it is. :-)

I'm really happy I kept kept this "log" of my activities. I've had some real misconceptions about my previous self, which the log has cleared up. I often think I came up with ideas or had viewpoints much more recently than I really did ("Oh, learning Scheme really was that long ago."). I wish it went back further, because, for example, I really am not sure at which point I became an atheist (early 2003?) or a left libertarian (summer 2003?). I tend to think of my previous self as more stupid than I really was, which gives me this false impression of intellectual progress, when really I am as dumb as I ever was! I know one one thing for sure, my writing hasn't really improved!

So, thanks for reading! If you don't already have a blog, start one today. Keep up with it, and at two years I'm sure you'll be really glad you have it.

Here's to another two years!

Have a comment on this article? Start a discussion in my public inbox by sending an email to ~skeeto/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht [mailing list etiquette] , or see existing discussions.

This post has archived comments.

null program

Chris Wellons

wellons@nullprogram.com (PGP)
~skeeto/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht (view)