10 years of blogging...

On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog. I then proceeded to “back fill” the blog with various things that had either been posted before in other places or had been laying around waiting for me to have somewhere to put them. This is why although the blog began in 2003 the archives go back to 1992.

Things have changed quite a lot since then, both in terms of blogging and my life. Back then blogs were hot, there was lots of buzz around them and a lot of the things I wrote were designed to help connect my blog to the blogs of others (usually others that I perceived as having lots of readers in the hope of attracting readers to my blog). I like to think that the best things I wrote back then were the things that were more technical and less attention seeking and once I decided to stop trying to attract readers and simply write, the readers started to come. Now I only write technical stuff either for users of my Server Framework or as notes to my future self. I tend to view my blogs and my source code archive as ‘my spell books’; the reference material that helps me be better at what I do for a living. Whilst I can’t publish all of the code that I have I can at least put some of my thoughts up here for people to pull apart. Since I often work alone it’s a way for me to get feedback from a technical audience. It doesn’t often work but when it does it works well.

The blog itself is still driven by Movable Type and looked pretty much the same from 2003 through to the end of 2010 at which point I split my blog into multiple blogs and adjusted the design so that it matched in with my new company and product websites. You can see the various changes in style over at The Wayback Machine. Most of my sockets and networking talk has been moved off to The Server Framework blog though all of my technical blogs share the www.lenholgate.com “front page”. I quite like the integration and it works well for directing readers to the appropriate place. I still have two blogs that are not integrated, mainly because they’re hobby blogs and also because they’re not really that active any more; my skiing blog (still skiing, just not writing about it) and my embedded assembly and robotics blog.

I have far less time for blogging now. Working for myself from my own office at home takes up lots of my time and provides no “commute time” for writing, and I now have a wife and two sons to keep me busy when I’m not working. I hope that I’ll still be blogging 10 years from now. Who knows. Thank you for reading and taking part.