Russell Beattie

It's amazing what two years will do. I'm now employed as the weblog guy at a mobile startup, but it was two years ago today when I started using Radio Userland and started grasping the whole idea of what weblogs are. It's amazing that two years on, I still see new weblogs with essentially the same type of post in their first week:

Weblogs

Okay, so they're the in-thing now. I wish I thought of the idea years ago since it's such a simple thing to do - you write your thoughts, click a button and bam, your home page is updated with fresh content. It's a great idea since no one likes stale vanity pages. I have a "notebook" link on my home page and though it's similar, it doesn't have that immediate effect that a true weblog (or blog if you like) does. I've just decided to make my personal website - which up until now has contained a bunch of photos and my resume - into a true weblog. I hope it doesn't take away from my resume since I'm still looking for a job, but hey.

Okay, so I'm using Radio Userland's weblog system now and even though it's okay, I think I can do better (of course). What I want is a full automated Java based system that I can customize...

It was a few more months before I wrote the Java code which still runs this site and started blogging daily, but still... it's amazing to look back in the past and realize that this was the first step that lead directly to where I am today personally and professionally. Weblogs are *astounding* like this - and now two years on, blogging pretty much daily, I'm amazed at the ability to go back in time and see what exactly I was thinking on some day a year or two ago.

Cool beans...

-Russ