John Duprey While cleaning up my hard drive, I found numerous blog archives from years past. The content is outdated and quite cringy from a younger, even more clueless version of myself. However, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m a little less concerned about what people think of me. Some of the posts are quite nostalgic—a time capsule of my life.
I started blogging before it was even a term—inspired by Slashdot.org, which was new at that time. I first hosted my own PHP-Nuke site and was quickly hacked, ending that early experiment. Things got more serious when I moved on to platforms like LiveJournal, Posterous, Blogger (Blogspot), WordPress, and Squarespace (probably not exactly in that order).
Each time I left a platform, I’d export my data and import into the next. Its from the last set of Wordpress archives (and jekyll) that I’ve recovered by old posts. I’ve normalized the data and cleaned up the first year—2004. More may come if time and courage prevail.
By my count, there are 540 posts ranging from the years 2004-2015 and 2017.
And then, radio silence for YEARS… I realized I didn’t really have anything to say in long form, and there were other forums, like modern social sites, where I could “drop a thought”. Raising a child and keeping a demanding software engineering job took precedence.
Time has moved on. My daughter is grown. And I have a 30-year career to reflect on. While I have no idea if I have anything worth saying even now, I really like the idea of having my own platform to speak. I’m happy to release the first year, 2004, of archives as a (hopefully) fun/funny/interesting snapshot of that era.