10:39 – Barbara is still cleaning up, inside and out. I’m doing year-end stuff, working on my submission for the SPARK competition, and thinking about new science kits for 2014.
I happened across an article the other day that mentioned early blogs, so I checked Wikipedia and found an entry on early bloggers. It mentioned Jerry Pournelle, of course, but not me. Jerry’s and my current blog archives both go all the way back to June 1998. The difference is, that’s when Jerry–who proclaims his site as “The Original Blog”–actually started blogging. I’d been keeping my journal page for years before that, but those pre-6/98 entries are no longer on-line. From the time I registered the ttgnet.com domain in February 1995, I posted entries/articles at least several times a week, and often daily. Before that, I ran a Gopher server, and before that I ran a multi-line bulletin board system, both with frequent journal entries. All told, I’ve been “blogging” for perhaps 25 years.
For the last 15 years, I’ve posted nearly every day, and many days I’ve made multiple posts. Call it a minimum of 5,000 blog-days. In the 10 years before that, I posted less frequently but not all that less frequently. Call it a minimum of 100 days per year, or another 1,000 blog-days. Alas, those pre-1995 entries are probably gone forever. I suspect I still have the 2/95 through 6/98 entries archived locally somewhere. Perhaps I should dig them out and put them back up on the Internet. I suspect there’s no other blogger on the planet who can match my record of longevity and consistency. And yet I’m hardly ever mentioned when someone writes about early bloggers.