I first started blogging sometime around the 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 that I set for my blog was to diarise 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 and the post categories, hierarchies and HTML updating were frustrating and Byzantine (and at times, even life threatening). So I didn’t blog for a while. I just watched other bloggers become rich and famous; go on the lecture circuit, get advertising revenue, turn their blogs into best selling books and tell us they were at the fore-front 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, then the Fringe Festival, then 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 2005 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 sites identity. So, I registered craigbellamy.net and installed WordPress on my server. (TBC)
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