17 August 2005 - Started life on Blogger.
12 October 2005 - Moved to self-hosted Blogger
13 November 2005 - Moved to hosted WordPress.com.
30 September 2006 - Purchased domain name and moved to self-hosted WordPress.org
01 July 2007 - Adsense appears.
29 August 2007 - One of many crises of confidence where I nearly shut down the blog and deleted all content.
19 January 2008 - Adsense disappears.
15 February 2008 - Moved from WordPress to Habari.
This humble blog is four years old today so tonight I will be taking Blog in isolation and some of its closest friends to LazerQuest (Mega Death Match Party Edition with Pizza and gallons of Coca Cola to ensure the kids are well and truly revved up).
Everyone loves meaningful statistics so here is a pretty chart of posts by month (for all you management types):
Curiously, since I returned from my holiday, I seem to have rediscovered a little of my zest for blogging. Also, I have a feeling that things are gradually turning full circle. My initial decision to dip my toe in the water was prompted by reading and enjoying the writing of other people and I sense that element is slowly returning. More recently, reading blogs had turned into mindlessly hitting 'J' in Google Reader as fast as humanly possible simply in order to say 'Done'.
Over the weekend, I spent time enjoying some brilliant posts from the dusty archives of one of my favourite UK bloggers - Diamond Geezer (pseudonym alert). This, in turn, (via his blogroll) led to the discovery of a handful of other interesting and downright funny UK blogs. I have bemoaned my failure to find decent UK blogs more than once - maybe I just didn't look hard enough or in the right places.
Before my holiday, I was experimenting once again with Tumblr and Posterous and while these services may have a place for a rapid fire linkblogs, scrapbooks and ready made, easy blogs (for people who don't know or care what a blog is), I suspect that posts I made there were simply posts I could have equally made over here. But I was too lazy.
Blogging takes time. Blogging is difficult. Blogging is time-consuming.
Firstly, you have to think of a subject. Then you have to waste time thinking up all the words. Then you have to login. to your blog Then you have to actually type all the words in. Then you have to endlessly preview and endeavour to fix all your typos and grammar. Then you have to add an image to spice things up and break the article into logical sections for your reader (just like the 'Blogging 101 Guide' says). Then you have to add tags. Then you have to monitor and reply to all comments. Then you have to publicise it.
Yes - blogging is hard. So much easier and a lot quicker to hit 'Like' what someone else has produced.
Ironically, the well publicised death of FriendFeed sparked my interest and I was briefly active again over there, providing counselling services to the bereaved.
So, what does all of this mean for the next four years of this blog ? God knows.
Theres been a lot of chatter recently about Feedburners support for the PubSubHubbub protocol.
Apparently, it means that blog posts show up much quicker in FriendFeed, Google Reader and other services. I must admit I was fairly sceptical as my posts still take a couple of hours to appear.
However, I was wrong (again). Look at this recent example. The post showed up a full three and a half hours on Google Reader before I published it.
Apparently, the next release will read your mind, type the words in, link to relevant pictures and publish your blog entries automatically. It's called the 'real-time Web'.
This is a quick test to check that Habari is no longer adding additional paragraph tags and random line breaks for people consuming this blog in a feed reader.
Both of you.
Many thanks to arthus (possible pseudonym alert) aka Morgante Pell (additional pseudonym alert) for creating the plugin that made this possible and the death of autop().
Yet another service in the overcrowded blog comment field is JS-Kit who already have a conventional outsourced blog comment capability (similar to IntenseDebate and Disqus).
JS-Kit recently announced an extension to the service called 'Echo' which also includes any fleeting reference to your blog post, refreshed in real-time from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook.
Echo isn't generally available to mere mortals yet. Yes, you guessed it - it's limited beta, invitation only and curiously, you need a Twitter account to even request an invitation.
However, if your name is Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble or Duncan Riley, you are entitled to use the service which is fair enough as it works best for high volume sites with lots of comments
However, look at this example on The Inquistr of Echo in action on a live site.
Wow - just look at all those 'comments'. Look again closely. Most entries are not comments at all. They are merely links or retweets to the article from Twitter or FriendFeed. The vast majority merely echo the main headline with no additional comment or insight.
Look again and try to find any meaningful comments where people are actually commenting on the post and expressing their opinion. Guess what. The vast majority are mostly classified as 'via Comments'.
So, that's three reasons, I won't be installing 'Echo' on this blog.
Theres only one man in the world who could have uttered the following:
On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter.
Yes. You guessed it - Robert Scoble.
And yes, before you ask, he used a script.
Since I started this blog almost four years ago, I have posted every month. Until last month - July 2009.
To accentuate the radio silence effect, this blog was also completely offline for the latter two weeks of July 2009 (PHP/FastCGI configuration problem at Bluehost).
You see - Im really wasted in IT. I really should be in pre-sales or on The Apprentice.
I thought I'd return to my minimalist roots and change the theme on this blog.
If you're reading this in an RSS reader, no need to click through and leave a comment telling me 'I use an RSS reader so I don't care about your new theme' because I already know.
If you think 'Hey - this theme is simply a blatant rip off of Russell Beattie's blog, I'm going to run and tell him', don't bother. I already know and so does Russell.
Since I started this blog, I have maintained an interest in various blog commenting services. Back in November 2007, I experimented with SezWho and also reviewed three more similar comment tracking services before finally settling on Disqus.
Competition is obviously a good thing but this is proving a tough climate for small, Web 2.0 companies competing in a small, overcrowded marketplace and we have recently seen some consolidation in this area.
The two main commenting services that appear to represent serious competition for Disqus are IntenseDebate and JS-Kit although I have no personal experience of either product. Anyone out there used them ?
Just quickly reviewed the number of posts in each full year since I started this blog.
What does it all mean ? Not sure. Does it matter ? Probably not.