The ongoing embarassment that has been this blog
In early 2006, I put my goals together for the year. Among them was this nugget, “Complete blog design and consistently blog approximately once per week, stretch goal is 2-3 times per week” Subtract my two recent posts, and I’d say that I’ve failed miserably in both regards. Up until recently I was still using the default wordpress theme and my blogging output (or lack thereof) has been equally pathetic. Not that this goal should feel neglected, I just wasn’t able to get to all that many of them this year for one reason or another. And so it goes, year after year, I’m finding this to be the case. So, for you few readers out there, I thought it might be worth putting together a little history of the past few years and why I haven’t done anything with this poor site.
1999 - The year that I started blogging, briefly on blogspot and eventually moving over to blueigloo.org (the domain name has since been sold to someone else). This was probably my best blogging output in terms of quantity of posts.
2000 - Still on blueigloo.org and blogging away. The quality however, was entirely different matter altogether. I was trying way too hard to be funny. This drew an audience for some time, but it wore on me to the point where I eventually scrapped it entirely.
2001 - I shifted emphasis to graphic design and totally abandoned the format. It was around this time that I first bought beforeitwasround.com. Early versions of this site were simply photoshop “doodles” that I did at work or in my spare time.
2002 - Still shying away from blogging, I went through various iterations of making biwr my personal website with the usual features like a small about me section, photos, links to friends, and a small news section. The news section was maintained by hand, the photos with a custom PHP script that I wrote. All of this was fine and dandy, the designs weren’t half bad, but overall the site was extremely dull.
2003 - In anticipation of returning to blogging, I installed movabletype and started to hack together a new blog and a new design. The site was renamed to flat. I really hated the URL’s that were produced by MT (i.e., /archives/01020034.php) so I devised a clever scheme using htaccess to try to make them a little more reader friendly. I also disliked the idea of having header/footer code on every MT page that was generated and wanted something a little more template driven.
2004 - The end result of my MT solution worked nicely for a while but the htaccess rules eventually became such a bear that it was incredibly difficult to make any changes or additions to the site easily. My blogging output overall was just ok. I frequently posted photos from around Boston (where I lived at the time) and had occasional bursts of good writing but most of the time I succumbed to really hectic work schedules.
2005 - Still trapped in the MT hell I created for myself and I basically completely ignored the site until midway through the year when I started to try to breathe some new life into it.
2006 - I scrapped MT and moved everything over to wordpress. I had plans for redesigns and nearly finished one before deciding it wasn’t good enough so I’ve kept with the default theme. I keep wanting to blog, trying to blog.
Which brings us to 2007, and we are nearly halfway through the year now. Including this post, I’ve now had 7 posts this year. Which averages to roughly one per month. Looks like I still have some work to do.