Russell Beattie

Amazing, but true - I started my weblog 10 years ago on the 24th of February, 2002. I had my domain and server for a few years before that which I posted handmade HTML pages and at one point used a Wiki, but the actual weblogging started then. For a while it was the biggest thing in my professional life, but that's long since faded away. Still, it's amazing to have had my own spot on the web to write up my thoughts over the years. Even if there isn't much traffic nowadays, it's great to be able to look back and read about what I was thinking at a specific time, and sometimes, even remind myself of ideas I had but have since forgotten.

I'm going to try to go through and pick out a 'best of' list of posts for my anniversary post in a few days, but it's really hard! A week or so ago when Apple launched their iBooks Author app, I thought it'd be cool to see if I could create a sample book based on my blog posts. So I wrote up a script to export all the text into one giant text file, and of course I counted the words. Would you believe I've written over 1.2 million words here over the past decade? That number just astounded me - especially since I've rarely posted more than once a month over the past few years. I was a blogging machine early on.

The problem of course is that all those millions words do not all add up to astounding prose. There's a lot of pure junk which is hard to wade through in order to find the one or two nuggets of insight I may have had at the time. And sometimes, posts that I remember as being particularly special are filled with crap as well, or references which are out of date and thus doesn't read well outside the context of the moment. Oh well, I'm sure I can find a few paragraphs here or there to include. It's going to be a slog though, I can tell.

So anyways, I gave the site a quick splash of color, then for fun, I imported all my Tweets and put them on their own archive page as well. (I'm missing a few hundred in the middle somewhere, I'll have to figure out how to extract them from Twitter). Tweets are pretty much useless as an archive of anything, but I figured I'd post them since I had them. I also cleaned up the front page a bit into a summary list of posts and generally dusted the corners here and there. I also went to archive.org and found a bunch of older pages which I took screen shots of the front page to make an image for this post... It's amusing how many variations of my name I can create and still not be particularly happy with any of them.

Hey, if you're reading this, and you happen to have any 'favorite' posts of mine, send me an email so I can add them to my list!

:-)

-Russ