nullprogram.com/blog/2009/09/01/
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!