A Year Ago Yesterday.

Goodness. I missed my one-year anniversary in weblogging.

A year ago yesterday I posted My Love Hate Relationship with Perl my first weblog entry of any type. (Poor grammar and editing perserved!)

My former employer ran a short lived experiment with weblogging aimed at existing and potential clients and the press. It was a good thought, but with all of the internal chaos (layoffs, declining revenue and power struggles everywhere) the effort seemed rather frivolous and began languishing almost immediately. In hindsight, it was too structured, too planned and too stiff. It was a valuable learning experience for me. It also exposed me to weblogging and lead me to discovery MovableType.

That effort pretty much died when most of the staff who wrote to it either quit or was laid off or feared they where next. Over some drinks with my former colleagues including a few still employed in the systems administration department, I made the mistake of mentioning it was up and I had the last three entries even though I hadn't worked for them for nearly 6 months. That site disappeared almost immediately. Even The WayBack Machine hadn't recorded it. I've since received permission to republish my entries for posterity and will eventually get them all back up.

Faced with a similar situation of vanishing personal content from the public Internet, Jon Udell reposted his works elsewhere stating I took this step reluctantly, and would have preferred that the original namespace remain intact, but so be it. Those columns that have continuing value can now weave themselves back into the fabric of the Web.

I'm not even close to being the writer Jon is, but I hope in some sense the same is true here. This particular piece was an appropriate beginning for me at the time. Later I went on to write some things that I believe are still relevant and became the basis to content I've been covering here -- the beginnings of my leanings towards RESTful Web services in addition to early insights on FlashMX and J2ME. I take great delight in the no-design look of this post now after all of the over zealous creative folks I had to endure in my project work over the years.