Hey, I just realized that I’ve been blogging for ten years now. That’s some kind of milestone.

From hand-crafted to Blogger to MovableType to WordPress

Back when I started in 2003, it was really a learning experiment on my part. I was a consultant at the time, and felt that I needed to get first hand experience with blogging as a medium in order to really advise my clients when they would bring it up.

So, the options in 2003 were fewer. I started with just writing raw web code. Then I went with Blogger. After a couple of months, I switched over to MovableType and stayed on that platform until the very end of 2008. Really, MovableType was great, and I only reluctantly left it for WordPress, which I’m still on.

Why did I leave MT? Because the upgrade process was a pain. I often had to allocate an entire morning to upgrading the core MT software on my web server, and WordPress allowed me to upgrade in under 1 hour.

Today upgrading WordPress is even faster, typically taking only the click of a button. (I have automated daily database backups, so my content is safe if the install should fail.)

Now, on each platform migration, my blog posts suffered. I have yet to see a clean content export and import, and if you were to look at some of my really old blog posts, you may wonder if you’re not seeing the whole post. You’re not.

So, what are the most viewed posts?

At this time, here are the top 5 blog posts on my site, by views over the past 30 days.

1. How to Write Release Notes (1577 views, published in March of 2010)
2. How to Aim with Iron Sights (1379 views, published in October of 2009)
3. How I use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign from Google Analytics (812 views, published in November of 2011)
4. Signing and Encrypting E-mail on Mac OS X 10.6 Using Self-Signed Certificates (310 views, published in December of 2010)
5. Small-caps, web text, and CSS (175 views, published in April of 2011)

One observation: “how to” articles get read more than personal anecdotes. Not surprising, right?

Will there be a 20-year anniversary for this blog?

Presuming I’m still alive and that blogs are still a real medium, probably. Now I probably won’t be posting with any more regularity than I have been for years, and the quality of the posts will continue to be hit-and-miss. And a theme for the blog? Not likely. This is just a personal blog, and remains a bit of an experimental place for me.

What has been my biggest challenge? Not being able to write about what I do at work as openly as I would like. I would have some great material, but the risks of disclosing proprietary information and upsetting my colleagues have stopped me, and will probably continue to do so. Oh well.