There have been so many things going on around here lately, that something got away from me entirely, and wasn’t remembered until I had a moment to stop and think.
I’ve been blogging for about eleven years now! My 11th Blogoversary just passed, on February 21st. At that point, I had the domain for inkyblack.net, but I was using it just as a portfolio and personal website. Nowadays, a site isn’t complete without a blog. Back then, who wanted to see a series of essays on a theme, or a run-on journal? Most folks wanted just a small place to showcase their personality and, if they were talented enough, their work.
I started off with Blogger. I think there were a few of us in the office who were giving it a try, mostly the women. After awhile, I tried getting our web host, the wonderful Colin, to whip something up for me in mySQL and PHP (which he did, but it was less than elegant, I’m sorry to say). I fought with the manual coding for awhile, and I think that’s about the time I installed Movable Type. That was a sort of halcyon period for my designing…I was living with Robin and Mike (very creative atmosphere!), and Movable Type was very easy to design for. It had the necessary tags to call the back-end coding into play, but you could get away with just plunking them into a fairly static template. Wordpress was still in its infancy. A lot of Web Design chicas cropped up and made the community on the MT boards a lot of fun.
It didn’t last, though. I next moved to Livejournal. I still keep a backup of this site over there. Movable Type was going to a more commercial scheme, and those of us who didn’t want to pay for it basically went elsewhere. I went to Livejournal, made most of my posts “Private”, and stayed there until I decided to resurrect inkyblack with a better sense of direction. Thank goodness for importing.
We’ve been using WordPress since then. As mentioned, LJ is the backup, in case things go haywire (which they did last year when Colin lost the server to old age). It was a reminder that sometimes you just have to try and plan ahead for contingencies. I’ve been using standard templates while I try to figure out the tagging and PHP system that WordPress uses. Hopefully I’ll have that figured out soon enough.
That brings us here, though, eleven years later and hopefully older and wiser. Don’t bother going and looking for those really early posts…they’re still locked as “private”, and that’s probably a Very Good Thing Indeed. I tried reading some of them earlier and wound up wincing so much that I thought I might develop a permanent squint. My writing has developed a LOT since then.
Many bloggers hold contests for events like this. Sorry to say that I’m not one of them! For starters, we missed the blog’s 10-year milestone, and secondly, I have nothing to give away! Might as well wait for the 15th Blogoversary for that! What I *can* offer is better writing (hopefully), a fairly nicely produced podcast, and the knowledge that I’m working on making the site prettier and more navigable as time goes on.
Happy Belated blogoversary folks, particularly to those of you who have been reading for the past eleven years. You know who you are! Thanks for the comments, the constructive critiques, and company! You have no idea how much I enjoy all of them 🙂
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