Teaching an old domain a new blog

It’s about 20 years, give or take, since I first launched a personal blog. If I recall correctly, I published my first post from a nondescript British Airways lounge in Heathrow airport, having just completed 20 hours of flying from Australia and waiting a few more hours for a flight to Denmark. The background image of the blog was inexplicably a picture of a Big Red chewing gum packet.

Back then we had no Twitter, or Reddit, so to post about random stuff we needed our own blog. Blogger existed, but as a web developer it was much cooler to run your own server.

That blog came and went (and sadly I have no backup). Then another blog came and lasted well over a decade. I still have it, but the articles are nearly all about obsolete technologies so I’m not going to convert the archive here. I had many posts that were in the top three Google results for a given topic, but the most popular by far was a post I wrote as a joke, with fully working code showing how to use XSLT to convert RSS directly into raw SQL insert statements. The next most popular were 2. an un-ironic post about creating a GMail-tag like interface for Microsoft Outlook using VBA; and 3. a binary tree implementation in Erlang.

So here we are, with 2020 behind us, and a new blog - with, I promise, not a single post about XSLT or VBA (no promises either way on Erlang :)