Blast from the Past
I finally got round to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for a long while: migrating my old (pre-2008) blog entries to the new engine. The archive now goes back to 2002, when I first started this site.
To put this in context, that’s two years before Facebook1, four years before Twitter, and nine years before Google Plus. Geocities and the original MySpace were around at the time, but they aren’t any more.
This gets to the heart of why I go to the trouble and (very minor) expense of hosting my own blog. I’m on various social networks, but in the knowledge that whatever I put there isn’t really under my control: it’s at the mercy of the whims, competence and cash flow of someone else. They may decide, at any moment, to chop and change it, festoon it with advertising, or hide it completely. The entire service is liable to disappear, taking my words with it, if it’s not paying its way.
The stuff I write here is mine, and I’m not beholden to anyone else to keep it here. That’s important to me; if it’s important to you, put Twitter and Facebook down for a moment and get yourself a blog.
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Four years before it was open to the general public, as opposed to students at particular institutions. [back]