Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I’d been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph).
My blog was part of a larger blogging program I’d put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums — an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn’t a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon’s home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code).
I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon’s business; and my blog settled down from the program’s focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn.
Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon’s plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I’m moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard.
I’ve managed to export my whole four years’ worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to WordPress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into WordPress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available.
With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the WordPress open-source community.
If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I’ve been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent — Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don’t need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you’ll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here.
More anon!
