Ten years of blogging
Ten years ago on April 10th, 2005 I launched this blog and posted for the very first time. It began more as a personal homepage instead of a blog, because back then I didn’t yet have a separate website for my services, but in the last 7 years or so it served more as a blog.
Ten years is a long time, even though I haven’t always been very active. Looking at the archives it looks like I’ve had at least one post every month. Right now I have 351 published posts.
I had hoped to have launched a completely new design for my blog and website by now but haven’t really been able to do a lot of work on that. Among other things, the work I do for my clients comes first. I started working on a new design in early 2014, but had to spend most of my time on other projects not long after that. I’ve since picked up working on the new design again, but in the mean time I decided to make some minor changes to the current design so I can keep using it a little longer. By doing this I can also start preparing the existing content for the changes in the new design.
One of the things that had high priority for me was automating the footnotes in my posts. I used to create and add links to footnotes manually and that took a lot of time. Now I can use custom tags that get processed when a post is loaded and the footnotes are numbered, formatted and arranged automatically. Yes, I know that there are some WordPress plugins that can be used for this, but none of them worked the way I wanted. So I wrote my own functionality as part of my custom theme for this blog (see it in action here).
I’ve also added the ability to add additional notes to my published posts, mostly for reference/background/supporting information related to my personal research. An example can be seen at the end of this post.
Also new on my blog are special kinds of posts called research notes. I’m slowly going to be bringing all my research notes online on various subjects (I used to keep much of this info in draft posts). Not only is it easier for me to manage them in this way (keeping it all in one place), but I can also start sharing this information with everyone while I’m still working on gathering information, instead of waiting until I have a complete article (which can often take a lot of time). I think this may also be very useful to other people on the Internet who are doing their own research or might be searching for the same information.
And for those who like saving and printing webpages, I’ve (finally) added a print style sheet. Just do a print preview in your browser and you’ll notice that it looks a lot better than it used to.
There’s still a lot of room for improvement (like making the blog mobile friendly), but most of that will have to wait for the new design.
In the mean time, I think I should probably take some time off today to reflect upon, and celebrate, the last ten years of blogging.
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