Celebrating 20 years

Posted 7 hours ago

This week, my site is twenty years old! I do not know the exact date it launched but I do know it happened this week in 2005.

I had started a blog on Blogspot in February. I had learned about blogging in 2002 and had experimented with a static form of it on one of the sites that I worked on. I called it “Webmaster’s Log” and would post short blurbs about changes I had made to the site or things that I was learning related to the site content.

A friend of mine had told me about WordPress. So I decided to check it out. He even offered me server space and I gladly took him up on his offer. I took an existing WordPress theme and modified it. We had spent the summer in Hungary so images from that trip dominate the header image. I also reused the idea of ripped paper on the sidebar that I had used on our family website which I designed before this one.

I imported over the posts I had created in Blogspot. I am not sure of which of my posts is the first that I created on my own domain. In the last year, I added an article I had written in 2003 for our ministry newsletter.

I have always enjoyed learning. And I equally enjoy connecting others with helpful resources. If you knew me in person, I would probably tell you something that I learned in one of the many books that I am reading.

I was sharing with one of my colleagues about something I was learning in the area of web development and he encouraged me to blog about it. So I started this blog to share help­ful resources, soft­ware, and other websites that I have ben­e­fited from in my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life. I also cre­ated the site to be a “sand­box” so that I could play around with dif­fer­ent design and devel­op­ment ideas.

It has been a place where I can put into practice the things that I am learning. I used Sass for the first time when building a new theme. Just this year, I added view transitions as a way of test driving the feature.

I blogged quite frequently in the first years of this site. But then I slowed down when I made a career transition. I was able to incorporate blogging more into my workday before I made the transition. I found it more of a challenge when I had to do it after work hours and I was a father of three young kids. There are several things I wish I had captured in those years between 2010 and 2018. I transitioned into freelance in the latter part of that time period but again struggled to make time for it when I was busy. And then struggled to find motivation when I was not busy.

Starting the practice of weeknotes in 2018 was the turn around for me. It gave me an easy way to start sharing things regularly and it felt less formal. I could just share little bits about a lot of different things. And then some of those small bits led to longer stand alone posts. Plus the regular practice of blogging with weeknotes led to making the time to write other articles. Writing begets more writing.

In 2023, I was inspired by Michelle Barker to attempt a post a day. She had participated in an organized effort. I decided to create my own challenge. Despite December being a busy time of year, I was able to complete the challenge. Again, I found that writing begets more writing and found myself writing more often apart from my weeknotes. I wrote quite a bit last year (74 posts) despite going dark for about four months during my period of unemployment. But I picked up again and this year I should break my personal best of 87 posts that I wrote in 2023. Though I didn’t necessarily intend to, I have been able to write a weeknote every week so far in 2025.

I think it is important to celebrate milestones. Twenty years of doing anything is quite an achievement.

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