little bits of everything

 I've been tagged by Keith (aka adactio) , not personally, but figuratively. Only by answering these questions can I close the browser tab with his post on it. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Because I enjoyed reading other blogs and I wanted to join in. I love the idea of publishing to the world. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? I use Google's Blogger. It's a bit of a backwater, and doesn't get much love from their developers, inasmuch as they're not developing the platform. But it's free though, and I can use my own domain name. Before that I used Dave Winer's editthispage.com. More on my 20 years of blogging post , which I wrote 6 years ago. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? The latter. When do you feel most inspired to write? If you look at the list of articles you'll s...

4/1/2000 Things are moving   We've had the letter from Wycliffe about "raising support".  They want us to aim that 25% of our income comes from other people by the end of a year, and 50% by the end of two years.  Other news: I've officially asked for voluntary redundancy Spoiler: after 4 years of trying I didn't even get to 20%, so I was paid a salary after all.

3/2/2000 Things are moving! Our buyer wants us out in 4 - 6 weeks! We've got friends who have agreed to put us up until accommodation is available at Wycliffe.\\r\\n\\r\\nWycliffe have changed the arrangement, they aren't going to pay a salary, they are topping up our support. At this point I was working part-time in another job and part-time for Wycliffe. We were moving house so that we could be nearer the Wycliffe offices, and I was going full-time, but not with a salary as I first thought. I don't know how many people who knew us were reading this, but I was a proper blogger now.

Not really worth waiting for: 5/1/2000 A New start A new chance to put a message in. Doesn't make sense to me either. Come back in February for the next exciting instalment.

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer  made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com  for a 60 day free trial , so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?  23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day: Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet. Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next...

As of 23/12/1999 I will have been blogging for 20 years. I plan to do a retrospective on my first few blog posts starting on 23/12/2019, but before I was writing them I was reading blogs. Here are the notable ones from those early days. scripting.com I used to read this at work while I was dialing up to download our work email because as it was about scripting, which is work, isn't it? I stopped reading it a few years ago, but Dave Winer is still going. Through Dave I found... Tim Bray - Ongoing And I have been reading him ever since. He writes engagingly about technology, boats, his electric car and toast . When I see that red diamond in my feedreader  I will often read that first. Magdelena Donea As her Twitter bio says, "Once famous on the internet". I first came across her website (probably called a webzine in those days) from a link on the Microsoft homepage( or maybe it was the Internet Explorer homepage). Even the internet archive doesn't...