I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.
Is 19 years ‘correct’?
I’ve taken a stab at recording my blogging history as recently as last August. Looking at my notes from that earlier post, I see I had recollected first using WordPress sometime around 2005, so around six years into my blogging lifespan. Prior to that I was using first Geocities and then PHPNuke as my ‘content management’ solution.
That suggests that the ’19 years’ that WordPress is crediting me for is actually short of the mark by about a year. I initially suspected this was accounted for by the fact that I have always self-hosted WordPress i.e.: I run the software on my own computers and do not actively use the WordPress.com service.
I had a vague recollection that I had to create a WordPress.com account at some point to access some features for my self-hosted configuration. My recollection was that also might have required creating a blog. I checked and I can see that I owned the appropriately named “NotABlog” on WordPress.com. I have more or less completely forgotten that this ‘site’ exists, and it remains to this day as a dead end with my fingerprints on it.
I just revisited the NotABlog site this very moment and yes, my one and only post there has a timestamp that matches up perfectly with the 19 year anniversary ‘achievement’ showing up today: March 2, 2006. My single post there even explained why I created the unused blog- to get an API key for their then-fairly-new anti-spam tool, which I know and love as Akismet. Mystery solved!
Benign appendix
NotABlog feels like a fairly ‘safe’ left-over from an earlier era, like that weird little dead end in our intestines called the appendix. Could I get rid of it somehow without disrupting my WordPress Akismet API key for my actual blog? I suspect there is a way to do this here in the future of 2025.
But I’m not really sure I want to go through the potential hassle. And it is a funny little reminder of how things worked nearly twenty years ago, and how much… or how little… blogging has changed with the passing years.
I still use WordPress and Akismet still works to prevent comment spam on my sites even after 19 years. And my posts are still largely ‘messages in a bottle’, read only by a privileged, intelligent, and beautiful few… 😉
