77 - It has been 10 years

10 years ago (actually 10 years and 2 days ago - but Wordpress missed the scheduled release date of this post, so here it is - manually published)

And I had a blog before that (Moveable Type based) and still another one (written in Python). Sadly, they no longer exist…

That makes me one of the older bloggers in Switzerland, even though I haven’t been as active as others (like Steph with her Climb to the Stars blog)

So why did I start a blog, and why have I revived it after a hiatus that lasted a couple of years?

My first presences on the internet were handcrafted HTML pages, written at a time when I still owned the domain jcf.ch (that I sadly lost due to neglect of the colleague who organized the domain for me), probably written in some arcane text editor on OS/2. Before that I was active on FidoNet and ran a mailbox (and an astronomical high phone bill), and on Compuserve. I have had an online identity since at least 1986 in one form or another. Starting a blog felt just the right thing to do - and so I did.

I have always met fantastic people in real life due to my online activities - Sysop meetings with hard disk throwing contests in Germany, Fido meetups in Eindhoven, the ColoradOS/2 (I even talked about Lotus Notes programming there in 1996) that was born out from discussions on CompuServe, the Lotusphere conferences. And post blog of course Reboot and Lift and the various Rails conferences I have been to and talked at.

Lately, the rise of Twitter (I’m an almost early adopter there, I joined 2171 days ago in March 2007) and Facebook (definitively a late adopter on that one) have sapped most of my online updates and activities. But blogging is so much more than just a “what am I doing in 140 characters”. It gives me (If I’m so inclined) the space to collect a bit more of what I’m thinking about, to write down my thoughts, sometimes even distill them into something worthwhile reading. I have however always treated blogging as a self centered activity. I don’t blog for others in general (but I’m delighted if you read and comment) and I don’t think about what would or would not please my readers. In the beginning I blogged a couple of links (some of them are still very popular according to the Google searches that bring new readers here) but that has been delegated to Twitter.

I’m also a firm believer in owning your stuff on the Internet. I don’t want to be at the mercy of some hot startup that gets bought out and closes down, or fails and closes down and takes “my” data with them. I much prefer to have this data on servers I control and backed up for good.

I have been enjoying reading some of my old posts, they trigger memories (good and bad)

I also enjoy the act of writing again (after having written way too much in the last years, I had an almost physical aversion against writing - topic for another blog post one day…)

So - to the next 10 years.