It’s hard to say for sure when this website started. My reckoning puts it sometime in 1998, so it is fast approaching 30 years on the web, though no evidence has survived of that very early form. What’s more certain though, is that at one point in 2001 I first experimented with something new and exciting called “posting”. The term “web-log” emerged in late 1997, becoming “blog” in mid-1999, and a couple of years later I decided to jump on the bandwagon and create a page that had its own distinct timestamp: my first post.

It’s something approximating poetry, amateurishly conceived and somewhat embarassing with hindsight. But there sure has been a lot of hindsight, because that post was twenty-five years ago. It was post number one.

This, on the other hand, is post number one thousand.

It’s been a journey.

Early Years

The first dozen or so posts were in that bad-teenage-poetry style, and there are a few more scattered here and there. But by early 2003, I was “blogging” proper—sharing my thoughts and updates from my life. This was my first time living away from home, and the year I turned 18. The posts are an interesting snapshot into that era, but remain extremely cringey, with lots of song lyrics and lots of the strange magical thinking that defined that phase of my life.

Then, in November of that year, LiveJournal happened. And it took over our lives.

The LiveJournal Era

I eulogised LiveJournal here in a post where I was wrapping up my use of the service. It’s hard to understate the impact LJ had on our social interaction as students and young adults. It was a time before Facebook, contemporary with Myspace and Friendster, the very early days of what would become the social media revolution.

It had a long tail; I sentimentally kept my account long after the 2004 heyday where our LJ handles were exchanged before even our names. But by 2008 life had moved on; I had a family and a life that felt like it had moved far away. My blogging slowed down, and I moved away from LiveJournal back to my own website.

Oddly, Kotori’s LiveJournal carries on. I created that blog for a friend’s table-top roleplaying game; an experiment with meaningful “downtime” between game sessions, where all our characters had blogs and would talk to each other about their fictional lives, hopes and dreams. I’ve long since lost the password, and even the email address that created it, so I can’t delete it, and I suppose it will last as long as LiveJournal itself does.

Kotori Hasegawa would be 37 years old now. I hope life brought her everything she wanted.

Serious Business

After family took over from friends, and “modern” social media took over from blogging, there was a distinct gap in my long-form blogging in 2008. But shortly afterwards, I decided to start blogging more “seriously”. Out went most of the personal posts and over-sharing, and in came updates on personal projects like software I was writing in my spare time.

In this period I spent no small amount of effort bouncing around between different platforms for my website and blogging, such as WordPress, Drupal, Octopress and Jekyll, and the history of the website is full of my constant attempts at redesign.

In the long haul of a decade of blogging, the number of real posts dropped off, replaced with information about software and hardware projects which I judged to be of more interest to most visitors.

I had a couple of attempts in 2017-2018 at reviving a blog that was clearly sputtering out into nothingness, before in 2019, a year passed with no posts whatsoever.

A New Home

A house move in 2020 kickstarted me into wanting to share more photos, and even brought back some of the more whimsical style of my very early blog posts. The new posts trickled along, moving with the seasons, and sharing my excitement at looking after a real home and planting a garden for the first time.

The Ham Radio Days

Then, in 2024, I picked up an unusual hobby: taking amateur radio equipment out into fields and hilltops, setting up, and making contacts with other amateur radio operators around the world. This was fun by itself, but I discovered a real passion for writing about it—and it seems, an audience keen to read about it too. 2025 was a renewed flurry of posts for sure, and things are now starting to level off, a steady stream of posting about a subject I could never have imagined this blog would be about when I first typed out some rubbish poetry, twenty-five years ago.

The Future

In truth, the number of posts on my blog (including LiveJournal) probably passed a thousand long ago. In the process of moving from LJ back to a personal website, I deleted a lot of posts. Some stood out as awkward memories that I would rather not re-live; most were just “Which ‘x’ are you?” quiz results, now broken image hotlinks that would never return.

So, what does the future hold? Will this blog make it to 50 years, and to two thousand posts? Who can say. I suspect not.

The over-sharing days of LiveJournal are certainly not coming back, not to me and not even to the young people of today for whom blogging is a relic of older generations. But I will keep posting as long as I can; as long as I can write something that others might be interested in reading about. A generation ago, I never expected I would mostly be writing about sticking antennas up in fields, so who knows what the next 25 years might bring.

To all my readers, whether this is your first post or you’ve been here for years: thank you. This would be nothing without you.