The weblog, or blog, is at least 20 years old. Its rise to power occurred during the middle aughts of the 21st century, and depending on who’s running a blog, it’s been a force to be reckoned with ever since. I’ve been riding the coat tails of this phenomenon the whole time.

My personal experience with blogging goes back quite a ways, starting with a personal website on GeoCities towards the end of the 1990s. I started to write posts on a semi-regular basis, usually one/month. I considered myself more a web developer than a blogger because of all I had to do.

“Back in the day” if you wanted to publish on the web you did everything yourself, starting with the HTML layout of the page. I used Macromedia’s Dreamweaver WYSIWYG editor all during this period, later abandoning it when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005. After that I used emacs and constantly checked my layout by rendering it in a browser, first in Internet Explorer, later in Firefox. It was around that time that I also got a free Blogger account, the minimal version, before it was acquired by Google. Blogger had something I thought was revolutionary, a browser-based editor, and it supplied all the HTML framework. All I had to do was type in content. It was also during this same period that Yahoo was ruining GeoCities, the prime reason I was driven to Blogger.

I consider WordPress my third general web home after GeoCities and Blogger. I love the web interface and all it can do, considering it far more powerful than Google’s Blogger. Google has let Blogger go to seed; little has changed over the eleven years I’ve been involved with Blogger. Coming over to WordPress was exhilarating compared to Blogger. I’m glad I moved.

Because it’s now so easy to write and publish with WordPress (compared to everything I’ve experienced) I’ve begun to think more and more about writing. I’d love to write far more than I do. So many ideas keep “blinking on” in my mind, but I have so much to do with my regular life that when I do have time to write I’ve lost those trains of thought. It happened to me a lot last year. This year, as an informal new year’s resolution, I’ve decided to write whenever I can, as often as I can. You’ll thus see a spurt of two or three or even more posts/day, usually on a weekend, followed by periods of dormancy, usually during a week day. That’s my life and I’m writing around it.

I like to write. I want to write. I need to write to keep my limited writing skills polished, and if at all possible, develop them even farther. I make no apologies about “serial blogging.” I read that phrase on another blog used to castigate that author because he dared to write more than one post/day. I will write when the thoughts are hot, even when they’re not. Nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to read what I write.

With that thought in mind I’d like to thank everyone who has decided to follow my blog. You give me something very precious, a sense of community far stronger than anything I ever felt back on Blogger. I value each and every one of you. You all motivate me to not just write, but to strive to write well. Thank you, my WordPress friends.

I’ve been “officially” on the Internet since 1985 when I was given a good old fashioned dial-up Unix account on a system named bilver (wbeebe@bilver) by the late Bill Vermillion, about a year after I’d moved to Orlando, and right after I moved into our first house. I’d gotten to know Bill through the Central Florida Computer Society, and voted for him becoming the society’s president in 1986. It should be noted I got the account before the election, and no, he wasn’t buying my vote as some (perhaps jokingly) noted at the time. I voted for him because he was highly competent and very easy going, a rare combination in technical people.

He ran bilver for his own personal contracting use. He allowed myself as well as a few others to use bilver and never asked me for any recompense. During the time I was there I was careful not to abuse his generosity. One way to abuse his generosity was to abuse bandwidth by requesting news groups that distributed source packages as binaries that’d been tarred up for easier distribution. I tried to grab some of the packages via those newsgroups until Bill politely asked everyone not to, and why, at which point I stopped. Right after that I began to dabble with ftp sites, which Bill helpfully pointed out.

Through bilver I had standard email and Usenet access and the opportunity to home some of my basic Unix skills. That lasted into the early 1990s when Bill changed the nature of bilver, at which time I switched to using commercial email services such as the then-new email account with Bell South, and later with Time Warner’s Road Runner. I lost something when I left bilver, most of which finally came back only many years later with Solaris and then Linux. But the camaraderie that existed within the small group is gone forever…

It was 2000 that I registered for an official Web-based email service with Yahoo which I still have it. Looking back the oldest email is from 27 September 2000, an order confirmation from Borland for JBuilder 4 Pro (remember those guys? and that product?) Yahoo was my one and only mail service until 2005 when I applied for Google mail. The date for the first email I still have is 20 February, the original greeting email from Google.

Over the first 20 years I had perhaps six or seven (I can’t remember them all) personal email accounts. And no email spam.

And that’s not including all the corporate accounts (mostly Outlook) that I had in parallel.

I never had real problems with spam until the early- to mid-2000s when it started to trend up. Over time spam filters have appeared and grown ever sophisticated to the point where I now have automatic spam filtering and ubiquitous spam folders on all my email accounts, personal and corporate. That’s the only kind of spam I was exposed to until the mid-2014s when I was introduced to referrer spam on my Blogger blog. Being unable to control that kind of spam (Google provided no clear and reasonable tools) I walked away from that blogging platform to WordPress and opened this blog. It looks like WordPress keeps that kind of spam at bay because when I look at views and visitor statistics, they’re all real; nothing massive from Russia, which is where all the Blogger referrer spam was coming from.

Now, however, I’m getting a lot of comment spam. Fortunately the comment spam filters provided via Akismet have kept comment spam out of my postings, for which I am extremely grateful. Yes, there is the possibility of false positives blocking a legitimate comment, but when I look at what does get through to the spam comment holding area for me to check later, I don’t think I have much to worry about. I have yet to find a single comment that was incorrectly flagged as spam. And no, Blogger doesn’t have comment spam blocking either.

I’m very happy with WordPress and Akismet. I hope to stay this happy.