Russell Beattie

I was just noticing that I have posts from last year... Wow. In my mind the true one year anniversary of this weblog will be in May/June, right around the time that Alex was born. That's when I "got the religion" and started writing daily and created the MiniBlog.

However well before that I tried a few other ways to easily publish thoughts online - all of which taught me some things, but ultimately went away. The first was the original Notebook that I created in September 2001 which was basically a personal Wiki. Because it had no auto-contents listing, I had to add the link to the front page, click on the link, edit the new page and save it, many times having to adjust titles, etc. I only added a dozen pages or so before I left it alone.

Then in January last year I started seeing weblogs and started getting what the fuss was all about. So then in February of last year I bought Radio Userland and created my first weblog which was supposed to be a tech weblog where I would write and post code. The first post was on February 24th, 2002. And I analyze "what is a weblog" a few days later on Feb. 28th... being a programmer, I immediately started chafing on Radio, and posted my thoughts on creating my own weblog program:

Why do all this when Radio already exists? Well I'm a programmer and it's a challenge and it's a "personal itch" I need to scratch, so I think I'll go from there. Personally I like the writing and planning part much better than the programming part, so we'll see.

So. To get started, I really think I'm going to try to KISS it (Keep It Simple Stupid). I'll use a DB back end since that's the simplest, and I'll just focus on doing my edits from a web page for now. Then I'll transfer this writing over to the new system and re-launch both my personal website and this site...

Which, amazingly enough, is what happened, though four months later. This all seems like a veerrryy long time ago. Having a kid and starting to weblog at the same time does something to your sense of time, I think...

This is fun - going through and looking at how my mind worked at the time. Anyways, March of last year I posted a handful of times... Including this post from a year ago tomorrow where I talk about how I JUST got ADSL after a four month struggle with Telefonica and how I couldn't WAIT to download BEA's Weblogic Workshop. ;-) Nice.

And then I didn't post again really until May when I started using Blogger (god knows why). This is a real shame since in April Ana was 8.5 months pregnant, and it was the last few moments of my life before Alex arrived. It would have been nice to read some more of my thoughts from that very hectic time, but that's probably why I didn't write anything, really. Oh well.

Anyways, I finally wrote my own app, the MiniBlog and launched it on June 2nd last year and have been using that app and posting daily ever since. That to me is the true year anniversary, but it's neat to see me "getting my voice" several months before hand... It's great that I imported all this into my current system so I can see it now.

SO there you go, the history of how I started weblogging and the anniversary of decent bandwidth. Thank goodness - seriously, once I got DSL, I started to feel a bit more part of the world again and not as stranded far away in Madrid as I did before and I think that's what really allowed me to participate in weblogging to the extent I am now... all very neat.

-Russ