10 Year Milestone
Fellow photoblogger and online friend Jason D Moore recently achieved two milestones on his site. First was his 1000th post followed a few weeks later with the celebration of his 7th anniversary of his site.
After seeing Jason’s Facebook status on his 7th year, it got me thinking about my time online. Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine I pulled up my first site that used my old URL mbenton.com (which now redirects here). It appears I just passed my 10th anniversary online.
My first entry was dated 9/6/1999:
Wecome to my website. Please be patient while I find the time to work on it. In the next few months I expect to build a site that hopefully will become a usable resource for Software Engineers. Topics I am most interested in are XML, Java, JavaScript, HTML, UML, and CMM procedures.
Please check back soon.
marc…
Here’s a screenshot of the original site:
In 1999 Wordpress, Movable Type and other blogging and CMS solutions were nonexistent. This site was lovingly built by hand with my trusty windows VI emulator (Lemmy). Lots of tables, no CSS. Surprisingly though I had little cross browser issues.
The purpose of my original site was quite honestly to grab some acreage on the internet and stake my name out there. Looking back now I realize I did not have a focus on what I wanted to accomplish. Due to this my updates were slow. I did have some good resources such as software language guides on the site, some of which I still use at times today such as the color index page. Overall though it was not a resource that would keep people coming back.
One direct benefit of hosting and building my own site was an increase of my own knowledge that could be brought to bear in my professional life. At the time I was a government contractor supporting the USMC. DoD code then was still mostly client/server using C, C++ and some Java. Web technology was the new frontier. I’m happy to say my teams helped blaze the trail by implementing XML and HTML in much of our software baselines and helped to set the stage for improved data sharing between USMC and service intelligence systems. Much of this success was due to our own personal uses of these technologies in our private lives.
Just over two years ago I relaunched with Movable Type and a new focus on social media. Also about that time my wife and I rediscovered photography and my postings about this subject gradually increased. Eventually I switched to Wordpress and rebranded as a photoblog. Today I feel better about my online presence than I ever have before. I still have times of slow updates due to work schedule but I am becoming more consistent. Its all about focus and finding one that reflects your passion. Digital photography is mine.
I congratulate Jason on his seven years. He’s shown focus and consistency for quite some time. While I may say I’ve been online for 10 years, when I compare my efforts against Jason’s or some of my other favorite photobloggers its more like 2 years. Here’s hoping 10 years from now we’re all still here with fresh and relevant content with our new holographic blog posts (possibly a new Wordpress plugin???).
Tags: anniversary, blog, Digital Photography, focus, jason d moore, online, Personal, website