Blogging Without Knowing
As I was preparing a few posts about blogs, it suddenly occurred to me that a while ago, back in 1999, as I was about to move to Sweden, I was already writing something which was more or less a blog – I’m not even sure the term had been coined at that time… The aim was back then to let my friends know what I was up to.
At first, I was struggling to put the whole lot online: I had to copy a template I had written, write the message in it, get the previous page, update the link and put both of them online. There was also a link on the main page which was leading to the latest page. When I got pissed off with all this, I wrote a Java programme generating the new page from the text I had typed in a Swing application and updating the previous page as well as the main page. It also calculated the number of days since my arrival there to display it in the message. But I had to put those pages online via FTP anyway… That was not a wonderful system but it was still a great improvement to me.
Funny to read this again, looking back at the time I spent in Gothenburg. I’m pretty sure anyone who’s gone there to spend a year as an exchange student might appreciate it as well. And that’s why blogs are so interesting, at the end of the day: people can share their everyday life. Even though it may look somewhat boring because it’s very personal, there is always something in there which might interest someone else. That’s a the great thing about blogs.¶
