That long? Really?

In December 1998 I uploaded a few files to AOL’s servers, giving the world (ah hem… my sister) the first glimpse of my writing and photography (such as it was).

My web site has gone through a lot of design changes since then. I began with a copy of BBEdit, writing up simple html by hand. From there I graduated to Adobe Pagemill, GoLive, back to hand coding very briefly, to iWeb, and my current blend of iWeb and minor tweaks.

My site has survived changes in addresses and servers. Its content was split up between different servers, put back together on a single server, and split up again (with the arrival of cool web services like Flickr). It has gone from servers at AOL, to (the company formerly known as) GTE, Time Warner, Earthlink, a small company I can’t recall, and Go Daddy (in spite of their commercials, it’s founder, and my better judgement). It even lived here for a while, using a great dynamic DNS service to cope with the changing IP addresses assigned by my ISP. It started out on one of the first iMacs – two of them in fact. One of them fell in the line of duty… my poor bondi blue little buddy, but otherwise they soldiered on reliably, 24/7. The only reason I ever rebooted ’em was for software upgrades.

Along the way I’ve gone to war with several Movable Type installations, euthanized a Berkley DB (the default database platform for Movable Type back in the day), fought the good fight with MySQL, tried WordPress for a little while, then settled in with WordPress for the long haul.

Cheryl likes to say we had a blog before there was a word for it, but I’m not going quite that far.

Through all the changes and hours of tender loving care, it’s been up continuously since its AOL days… now more than ten years ago. There aren’t many things in my life, outside of family, I’ve committed ten years to. This entry wasn’t meant to impress you with my technical savvy. High school students could do this in their sleep. I just can’t believe it’s been ten years.