Blogging at home again

Back in 1999 I set up my first ever online journal. I wasn’t thinking of it of a blog — in fact we didn’t really use that word yet — but more as an online diary of my life.

>**Thursday 30th December 1999**

>Hardly seems worth starting a file for December on the 30th. *shrug*

>Woke up insanely early, due to wrapping backwards in some odd way. Caught up on Usenet, fiddled with scorefiles, subscribed to aus.moto, avoided all work-related email, checked over the Netscape time capsule from yesterday’s slashdot, downloaded a couple of obsolete versions to play with. Fsck knows what incompatibilities they’ll suffer under the latest Debian.

>Evening. Went to see “Being John Malkovich”. Deeply weird and very good movie. Then went to Revelations (goth club) for the first time. I remembered why I don’t go clubbing much any more: too much {cigarette,dancefloor} smoke; too many people I don’t want to see; too many of the people I don’t mind seeing want to talk computers at me. I was wearing my “I hate computers” badge, but the only effect this had was to make some random at the bar try to hit on me by telling me he knew a Y2k consultant… Bzzzt, wrong.

>**Friday 31st December 1999**

>Fuck the millennium. I’m over it.

>Watched the fireworks in the city, standing on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets. Purty.

>Came home to find a lack of connectivity back to Netizen. Seems that one of Davnet’s routers (the one in our building) had glitched. Dunno whether it was y2k related or just randomness.

>Henceforth, the phrase “party like it’s 1999″ will be taken to mean “get bored and go to bed early.”

I also used Advogato quite a bit in 2000, achieving the ranking of “Master” for no particular reason I can discern, but I stopped posting there around the time I moved to Canada in 2001.

I cut my personal diary over to LiveJournal in 2002, around the time that e-smith, the Linux startup I moved to Canada to work for, was being subsumed into the much larger telephony company that had bought it. I was also buying a house: a spectacularly brief moment of home ownership for me, as Mitel laid me off just before closing, so I actually put it straight back on the market and only got to own the place for a brief moment in the middle of the paperwork shuffle.

In 2003 I experimented a bit with Movable Type, but didn’t last long: the blog world felt weirdly lonely, for some reason, as if I were standing on a soapbox declaiming out into an empty void.

In 2005 I started up my Geek Etiquette blog. It got off to a shaky start: a few posts, then an international move, followed soon after by a move back to Melbourne. But now, in mid 2007, I’m getting into the swing of it, and there are conversations happening in the comments, and it’s feeling comfortable. I’m also rather a fan of Wordpress. It’s a bloody professional piece of work (which MT never was) and it makes for a blogging tool that I actually enjoy using.

Alongside that, I’ve taken to reading a lot more blogs, via Google Reader. It’s slicker than Bloglines and along with the Add to Google Reader Bookmarklet has turned me into quite the RSS junkie.

And over in LJ-land, the shit has hit the fan over them suspending accounts in response to some militant nutjobs complaining about fictional rapists, David is talking about getting off LJ and the technological means to allow “friends only” communities across the blog world, and my old friend Dan has been talking about walled gardens in the social networking space. Reading Dan’s post, I remembered how in 1999-2000 I was adamantly against the idea of ASPs (that’s application service providers) and insisted on keeping all my own data on my own servers. Well, I’ve chilled out a bit about that — an open API will do a lot to placate me about you storing my data — but all in all, it’s starting to feel like time for a change.

So here I am. I won’t be shutting down my LJ anytime soon, and I’m planning to keep using it for much of my social chitchat, but from now on I’m planting a stake here on my own website and saying: Here. This is me. This is my website and these are my thoughts.