Congrats to 'The Boston Diaries' on 20 years of blogging [0]. It's
even more amazing that that 20 years is available all in one
place. I had to go into the wayback machine to figure out that my
first blog post was on 12/19/2003 - so almost 16 years. I won't link
to it as all my early blogging was not pseudonymous, but back then
it was all technical topics on Linux and network security. I also
switched platforms a lot. At first, I was using geeklog on a hosted
server, which lasted two years (I was pleasantly surprised to see
that geeklog is still around [1]). I then moved to self-hosted
wordpress, then blogger (yeah, I have no idea either), then again to
my own VPS with a custom install of pyblosxom. That takes me up to
2012, after which I pretty much stopped doing any sort of tech
blogging. I did, however, maintain a gopher phlog [2] and motd site
[3] on and off from 2009 until now, but more on general life stuff
than pure technical howtos. I've also had a gaming blog since 2013.
On formats - I wrote most of my early blog entries in HTML. My SDF
motd site is the same - HTML entries, and I wrote a perl script to
convert them to a text format suitable for phlogging, which is why
many of the motd articles can be seen in the phlog. In retrospect,
markdown would have been an easier way to go (I had to check,
markdown has been around since 2004). Writing raw HTML can be a
chore, and markdown can be used as-is for phlog entries, no
translation required. I do write in markdown for my gaming blog - I
use wordpress but keep the original posts in case I move platforms
again.
What's interesting is that early on, I wrote mainly for an
audience. I wanted other people to read what I wrote and comment on
it or otherwise get some use out of it. I also wanted to dig up
consulting business, and I always thought an online technical
presence was the best way to do that. Nowadays I don't care about
any of that and write largely for myself, although I do like to
comment on other phlogs/blogs and in that way be part of a virtual
conversation.
[0]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2019/12/04.1
[1]
https://www.geeklog.net
[2]
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax
[3]
http://slugmax.motd.org