If I could go back in time and tell 17 year old me that in 10 years time I’d still be blogging, 17 year old me would probably be rather surprised. But here I am – 27 year old me is celebrating this blog’s 10th blogiversary. A whole decade of blogging. Wow.
When I did my ‘hello world’ post back on the 14th January 2002 I would never have imagined that I’d still be going now. Despite all the changes in my life over the past 10 years – moving to new places, going to university, getting jobs, finding the love of my life – this blog remained here. Sure, it’s changed a lot, but pretty much every blog entry I’ve made is still intact here.
So, happy birthday blog. Maybe you’ll even be here in 20 years time.
Christine, the amazing woman that I’m planning to marry sometime in the near future, also happens to be a very good cook, and luckily for you, she’s decided to start a recipe blog called Making a Mess in the Kitchen. I’m hosting it, and it sits in its separate installation of WordPress (I had considered enabling Network mode on WordPress, since I now have 3 WordPress installs on here, but decided it was too much effort).
There’s a few recipes, and some other general cookery-ness, on there now, and I’m sure she’ll continue adding to it as she continues to experiment new things. I’ll just keep on washing up after her.
After a few months, I’ve become bored with the ‘Atom’ theme that I’ve been using since switching to WordPress. So I’m giving the Yoko theme a try, as featured in Smashing Magazine a couple of months ago. I’ve had to customised it a bit, and so I have spent my lunch hour at work learning about WordPress Child Themes so as not to disrupt the core theme files.
To me, it feels more fresh than the previous design. Whereas Atom was a big, extensible framework plugin, this is a relatively simple one. It’s also notable for using the new HTML5 tags and is able to adapt its appearance depending on screen size. Whilst this means that the mobile version of this site, which uses the WPtouch plugin, is now theoretically unnecessary, I’ll keep it for now.
Any thoughts about the new theme are welcome. I think everything should be working correctly but let me know of any funkiness.
It is with something of a heavy heart that I’ve decided to abandon Melody and move the blog to WordPress.
Long time readers will find this as a surprise – in the past, I’ve defended Movable Type when I’ve felt it under attack from WordPress ‘zealots’. Back then, WordPress was the new kid on the block, whilst Movable Type was much more established. Today, however, the situation has changed, and this is why I’ve made the change.
Movable Type
I left Movable Type earlier this year for a few reasons. Firstly, after trying Movable Type 5, I found it was aimed at large, professional blogs and not personal blogs like mine. The 4.3x line is still being maintained with security updates – MT 4.36 came out last week – but not with new features.
Melody
I hoped that Melody would provide a good continuation of MT 4.3x. Unfortunately I’m not that impressed – whilst it has improved some aspects of Movable Type, it hasn’t been the major step forward that I’d hoped it be. Furthermore, a number of plug-ins that I found really useful in MT didn’t work properly (or at all) in Melody, and as some of them were several years old and seemingly abandoned by their authors there was a slim chance of this happening.
It’s well known that the past few years has seen Movable Type stagnate. When I first started using it in 2002, there was a very active community developing plug-ins and themes for the platform. But this community has all but died out, and despite the best intentions of the Open Melody group it hasn’t re-ignited. The MT community is, basically, dead.
WordPress is where the community is. Whilst blogging in general is past its prime, WordPress still has a large number of themes and plug-ins which work with the latest version, plus active support forums. The documentation has even improved.
I’ve also changed. I don’t revel in spending all night adding new features and installing plug-ins. I want a blogging system that just works.
WordPress
What made me choose WordPress is taking over administration for the web site for one of the student groups that some friends are involved in. This previously used WordPress, and rather than try to shoe-horn it into Melody, I decided to stick with it. The system proved to much easier, more manageable and more slick than MT or Melody ever was. Upgrades, in particular, were very easy. So having used it for a while, a few hours ago I decided to migrate this blog too.
Getting the blog up and running in WordPress has been pretty easy. The import process from Melody was quite straightforward, and worked fine. I’ve then spent no more than a couple of hours trying some themes and getting the configuration in place. Despite being a completely different system, migrating from Melody to WordPress has taken about the same time as Movable Type to Melody.
The current theme is somewhat temporary – I haven’t yet decided on a final one. In the meantime I’d welcome any comments you may have.
For the first time in over 8 years, this blog is not running on Movable Type. Because I’ve migrated to Melody.
Announced in June 2009, Melody is a fork of Movable Type 4 maintained by volunteers, many of whom formerly worked for Six Apart (MT’s original developer). It carries on in the same direction as MT version 4, rather than the very enterprise-focussed MT version 5 which is now being developed by a Japanese company called Infocom.
Because of its common heritage with MT, you can switch to Melody by installing it over Movable Type, and then simply tidying up the bits that are no longer needed – there’s a handy migration guide, too. It’ll keep all of your blogs, comments and settings.
Because Melody is new, and not quite ready for a 1.0 release, there are a few minor issues still and the admin interface still looks like it needs a little polish. In particular, a number of plugins no longer work; for now, you won’t have to type the word ‘ball’ when commenting and you won’t be able to log in using your Facebook account, but hopefully new versions of those plugins will surface soon.
Way, way back in January 2002, when I was merely 17 years old, I started writing a blog. The same blog that you are reading, 9 years later.
While I’m not posting nearly as much as I used to – this is my first post of 2011, and we’re two weeks into the new year – the fact that it’s still going at all is a bit of a miracle, considering how long I persist with things. About the only other thing that I’ve stuck with for a long time is Flickr, which I’ve been using regularly for over 6 years.
9 years ago, this blog was hosted on a bit of free web space hosted by a company which now no longer exists, and I managed it using Blogger (back before the Google buyout). I was living at home with my parents, studying towards my A-levels, and using their computer, which ran the then newfangled Windows XP. Albeit, not very well – the computer was already three years old.
Nowadays, I live with my partner Christine, and work full-time, at the university that I ended up being a student at later that year. I use my own computer (one of three that I own), which runs Mac OS X – something that would have irked my 17-year-old self who was more interested in Windows and Linux and who thought Mac users were deluded zealots who paid over the odds for overpriced, incompatible computers just because they looked nice.
It’s been an interesting journey, and one that I hope will not end any time soon. Looking forward to this year, I’m planning to change to Melody once version 1.0 is out (it’s approaching release candidate stage) – this would only be the second time I’ve completely changed blogging package and would end an 8 1/2 year run with Movable Type. I’m also looking at a new template and better integration of my photos from Flickr and my tweets from Twitter, seeing as I’m more active on those sites than I am here.
Just recently announced is Melody, a new open source content management system based around the blog concept that is derived from Movable Type, the software that has powered this site for nearly 7 years. It has been developed with Six Apart’s blessing, and by several former 6A employees; its development is guided by the Open Melody Software Group which counts Anil Dash from 6A as one of its directors.
The system will stay API-compatible with MT, so that plugins will still work, but may drop support for lesser used features like Trackback and PostgreSQL databases (Update: These may be spun off into plugins, not dropped altogether – see comments). Focus will be on improving development and support of weblog themes (which has always been a little clunky in MT), but ultimately the aim is to generate a community around Melody which guides the development process. MT will stay on as a product of 6A, and while there will be some code-swapping between the two Melody is essentially a fork.
It all sounds like good news and I wish the team every success with the development of Melody – once a more stable release is available I may well switch to it. WordPress has, rightly or wrongly, stolen the limelight from MT in recent years so a proper, community-driven open source alternative could pull users back to the MT/Melody platform.
(Incidentally the default user name for a new MT installation is ‘Melody’ – not sure whether that was used as an inspiration or not)
5 years ago, I started a blog. It wasn’t particularly good, or even particularly interesting, but it was out there, on the internet.
5 years on, and it’s still here. It’s changed somewhat – the URL, the design, the back-end system have all changed – but it’s still my blog and I’m still the one posting it. Had you told me 5 years ago that I’d still be doing this, I’d have been surprised.
I’m not going to do anything big, or announce anything major today – for a start it has come at a really bad time 🙂 . But I just want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for reading this, especially those who have been reading from the early days.
Incidentally, I finally finished my dissertation yesterday, and had it laser-printed today, ready to hand in tomorrow. That’s one chapter of my life I’m very glad to have behind me 🙂 .
At about 6 minutes past 5pm on the 14th January 2002, I wrote this entry. 4 years, 4821 entries, 6689 comments, 757 trackback pings and a whole shedload of spam later and it’s my fourth blogiversary.
Four years is a, to put it bluntly, a bloody long time, and I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to keep it going this long. So many of my projects in the past have come and go – this is one that I’ve managed to stick with and it makes me proud to think it’s still going strong. I have no intentions of giving up now.
Most of all, I’d like to thank all of you who have commented and trackbacked over the years, especially people like Andy, Kim, Ben, Richy and Ciaran who have been commenting here almost from the beginning. It’s the feedback I get, more than anything, that keeps me going, so keep it up and I should still be here in another 4 years time 🙂 .
The blog has also been with me through some interesting times. Back in January 2002 I was a 17-year-old college student. Since then I’ve had my 18th and 21st birthdays, left home, been to university, got a degree and started another one, met Hari and visited lots of new places, met lots of new people and done many new things. I can’t guarantee that my life will stay interesting but at least if it doesn’t I have a good record of when it was.
And the blog itself has changed – back in 2002, there were no comments, trackbacks or RSS feeds, and I was posting using Blogger to some webspace that only had 100MB of monthly bandwidth. Now I use 100MB in about 6 hours, the site is powered by Movable Type, and I’ve graduated from RSS to Atom for all my feeds. I also started the sideblog in November 2003 which has been doing well too, despite a few quiet periods. I don’t regret starting this blog one bit – through it, I’ve made many new friends and got a lot of enjoyment.
Here’s to another 4 years! 🙂
Previous anniversary posts: 2003, 2004 and 2005 (when I nearly forgot).
