I first started blogging sometime around 2001. And I just logged onto one of the original blogging systems, Blogger, and discovered that all my posts were still there. The first post that I ever made was in a (private) blog imaginatively called ‘production diary’. And ironically, the very first task I set for my blog was to document the laborious task of building a large ‘web 1.0’ site, milkbar.au.au. There were 500 static pages on milkbar.com.au and in my very first blog entry I was complaining that Dreamweaver was stripping the blogger tags out of the HTML (I wonder what I was doing?). Blogger used to have a nifty FTP system where you would write a post on the hosted Blogger site, and it would FTP the contents to a ‘web 1.0’ site, giving the illusion of dynamic content.
Sometime around 2003, I discovered MovableType, partly because a few ‘A List’ bloggers had started to hit the scene, and I wanted to emulate their fame and fortune. One was Jill Walker, an academic from Norway, and the other was Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. In my wisdom, I registered the domain name history.net.at and installed MovableType on my server. Both were a bad idea. Historical knowledge doesn’t really lend itself to blogging (Dan Cohen may disagree), and I couldn’t think of much to say in the oppressive day-to-day grind of the diary format. And the first MovableType software was a nightmare; the post categories, hierarchies, and HTML updating were frustrating and Byzantine. So I didn’t blog for a while. I just watched other bloggers become rich and famous, go on the lecture circuit, earn advertising revenue, and turn their blogs into best-selling books, telling us they were at the forefront of an enhanced democratic system where everyone now had an equal voice. Except for me because no one was reading history.net.au. I wrote about the history of the 8-hour day, followed by the Fringe Festival and the Moomba Festival. But it didn’t seem to work. The medium demanded something different from me; it was as though I was ordering slow-cooked Peking Duck in a fast-food restaurant. It just didn’t seem to work.
Then, sometime around 2003, I discovered that some bloggers were vainly blogging in their own name. They were registering their own names as domain names and using this as the site’s identity. So, I registered craigbellamy.net and installed WordPress on my server. (TBC)
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