Apparently I started this blog 22 years ago. Sheesh.

This anniversary is a bit more nostalgic than most because I just went through over 1200 posts to make sure they worked after my migration from Wordpress to Hugo.

This isn’t the first migration I’ve had to do. Originally this blog was published using Moveable Type, but that migration was easier since there weren’t so many posts back then.

The young folks won’t remember those days around 2008 to 2011 when blogs reigned supreme. Social media had yet to take off and Google Reader was still around. My peak blogging time was around then and it was funny to see how many posts were pretty much one-liners that today I would put on Mastodon and not worry with creating a blog post. Heck, I didn’t even start putting pictures in my posts until 2004.

Speaking of pictures, they were tiny back then. We didn’t have these massive meggigglepixel things we have today, 640x480 was common. You want a panorama? Take a lot of pictures and stitch them together. I was also happy I was able to find almost all of the pictures, even though it required some spelunking into old backups. In the beginning you would have to link to your pictures instead of uploading them to the blogging platform, and they didn’t always survive a migration.

Also, back then people wanted to see just a short part of each post on the main page. While that is pretty automatic now, you used to have to embed a “more” in HTML comment tags like <!– more –>, to indicate where to break the text so that the reader would have to click a link to read the rest of the post.

Hadda go and remove those.

It took me awhile to get through all of them. At first I thought I would deal with all the broken links, usually by going to archive.org and finding one that worked, but since I was doing this in my spare time (and I spend most of the day in front of a computer) I soon gave up. Heck, the oldest snapshot of this site on the Wayback Machine is from 2009 when this thing was pretty mature. I thought it would be cool to see what it looked like back in the day but now that is lost to the sands of time.

Speaking of time, my opinions on a number of topics have changed in the two plus decades I’ve been writing this, and I’ve been asked by one of my three readers to reflect on those changes. I hope to have some of those thoughts up soon.

Anyway, 22 isn’t a hugely important number and I can’t say I’ve really kept this up much now that we have social media, but hey, I’ve already done more posts this year than in all of 2020 (but then 2020 was definitely a thing).

There are a lot of memories captured here and I hope folks enjoy them.