Happy Birthday, Blog

I almost missed this! It is still just about October 31st here now....well, I haven't been to bed yet. Which means, my blog is TEN YEARS OLD TODAY! That's a big milestone! Very pleased I've managed to keep it going so long. For a few years - mostly the early teaching years - it looked as though I might never come back, but then I got into knitting, got onto Blogger, and then it's just been easier to find time for it. I love having it to look back on.

I went back and read over some of those first posts, even though they make me cringe just a little (like, 10% as cringey as reading an actual diary). I remembered I only started it because I HATED the Blair Witch Project so much and felt I had to tell people about it. I don't remember knowing the word blog, in 1999. I called it Diario because I liked the word - even though it means Daily, and this has never been a daily endeavour. I had a couple of friends who kept diary-type things on their websites, which I checked in with often, but blogging was nothing like it is today. I wrote my blog in notepad and uploaded it on my 56k modem. I did not have a theme.

*rocks in chair, strokes cat, adjusts pom poms on tartan zip up slippers*

I still resist a theme. I don't really get why people have, say, four different blogs on four different things. That's what post tagging is for (if I were to use it properly, anyway). This blog is just for me to record things I am thinking about. Some of those early posts are quite personal, which is probably because I knew who my regular readers were and so I wrote with them in mind. These days, I don't really do that. Except, I try and make sure I put knitting stuff on here quite regularly because I know I have knitting friends who read sometimes.

I used to get a couple of random emails a month from people who'd done web searches and found my blog and liked it. That was always quite cool. I guess the web is too big now for random stumblings, although Mr Z looks at my visitor stats sometimes and came across a regular reader from somewhere in Oregon. That's quite cool. I don't think I know anyone in Oregon.

I've been thinking about dismantling the rest of the site and just keeping the blog, since I still get some mail about it and I don't have the time to follow it up. But, I painstakingly created all those graphics myself in Paint! I learned those HTML tags and wrote it all myself, in 1995! Yes, a real website, from 1995. Back then, a scrolling marquee was about the fanciest thing you could do.

Although there was also this tag, my personal favourite.

Blah blah nostalgia blah blah. Enough. Happy birthday, Diario. I hope I'm still writing in 10 years' time.




In other news....school starts again on Monday. I've had a most relaxing week off, though I won't have an actual FO to show, I fear. Close, though. The lace scarf centre panel is finished. I also want to take pictures of the bits and pieces I bought in London (many cool buttons) and yabber about what I did there; and I want to chat about my newest toy, a DSi (early Christmas present from Mr Z) and the new Wii Fit Plus I bought yesterday; and also to wax lyrical about the (moslt failed) attempt I made at batik today. But it'll have to wait.