One year of blogging

Today marks the first anniversary of the start of my blog (and, by a slightly contrived coincidence, my thousandth blog entry). It’s been a fun year. Here are my highlights—if you can’t stand lengthy self-congratulatory bullet points, stop reading now.

My first post covered the launch of phase two of the Web Standards project. I can remember agonising over a first post for ages, before eventually copping out and going for something dull but unchallenging.
A few days later I had my first weblog driven discussion, a debate with Hixie about standards compliance. Unsurprisingly, I lost—but it took me nearly a year to properly understand the issues involved.
The 24th of June saw my first rant about website usability with respect to the Glastobury festival site: amazingly the rant drew a response from the creator in October of that year.
My second rant was aimed at a far more deserving target: Connected Earth, whose site was so terrible it ended up as an example of what not to do in Jeffrey Zeldman’s new book.
On the 6th of July I discovered blo.gs; I’ve been using it to power my blogroll ever since.
The 10th of July saw my first published CSS experiment: Numbered code listings. It’s cropped up in a few different places since then.
Around the 14th, I discovered wikis, setting up the initial MACCAWS wiki and the Smarty wiki, which is still going strong.
Amazon launched their Web Service API on the 17th, and I released a PHP sample implementation on the same day.
I launched Archivist in August, the mailing list archive system used for the css-discuss archive.
September 2nd was another active day: I released the initial version of my XML-RPC library, and used it to create the first Pingback implementation, based on an idea by Stuart.
Towards the end of September I started an ill-fated experiment in blogging my lecture notes. I soon realised that lecture notes work better when confined to a separate site.
My big project for October was the css-discuss wiki, launched on the 11th.
Later in October came my experimental XML-RPC interface to the W3C HTML validator. I keep meaning to return to that and finish it off.
In November I attempted to run a PHP training course, and found that it was harder than I thought it would be. The training material I wrote is still available though.
I released Blockquote Citations in December, my first useful Javascript hack.
In January I switched to Linux.
The two big hacks for February were my Image Drag bookmarklet and Safe HTML Checker class for my comments system.
March was a month for playing with Javascript: I released a PHP/Javascript spell checker and getElementsBySelector, my most ambitious piece of javascript to date.
Also in March, I announced BCSS—the new Computer Science society at my University.
In April I released a bunch of PHP hacks, the most important being HttpClient, followed by code for supporting conditional GET and an XMLWriter class.
Finally, in May a rant about structural markup lead to my CSS tutorial series, of which there is plenty more on the way.

I’ve gained a huge amount from the last year, thanks almost entirely to the many excellent bloggers who have inspired me along the way (most of whom are listed on my blogroll). Here’s to another exciting year.

Posted 12th June 2003 at 11:59 pm

25 comments

Happy Birthday :)
Tom Gilder - 13th June 2003 00:14 - #
(P.S. methinks you might have meant "Glastonbury" and not "Flastobury")
Tom Gilder - 13th June 2003 00:15 - #
Hehe, I think that came from having Flash on the mind when I wrote that. Fixed now.
Simon Willison - 13th June 2003 00:31 - #
Happy blog-a-versary Simon :)
Nat - 13th June 2003 01:09 - #
Congratulations. :) Believe it or not, I've been reading since day 1. (I think I got your URL off your e-mail sig on a css-discuss or webdesign-l post.) Keep up the great stuff.

Adrian - 13th June 2003 01:55 - #
A thousand... sheesh. Ditto to what Adrian said (all of it).
Lach - 13th June 2003 03:26 - #
Add my name to Adrian and Lach's - and if you see me in your logs so often, it's because your blogroll has become my blogroll. Best wishes.

Micah - 13th June 2003 06:16 - #
Congratulations. Keep up the good work. ;-)
Simon B - 13th June 2003 08:04 - #
Congratulations, and thank you.

I've not been reading your weblog since day one, but from a month or so before you moved addresses. The main value of your weblog to me is that it is like a bunch of notes of interesting things from somebody with similar interests. You are essentially doing a bunch of surfing for us and reporting back the interesting bits, which increases the signal:noise ratio for the web a great deal. Your blogroll is also exceptionally good, you have a knack for filtering the web just so. I've been meaning to start my own weblog for months now; when it finally happens, yours will be an inspiration.

PS: I've just noticed the "Preview Comment" button. <homer>Woo-hoo!</homer>

Jim - 13th June 2003 11:08 - #
Only a year? I would never have guessed - you've managed to build up a good following in a very short space of time. Kudos to you.

PS Simon - what about that Birmingham conference on accessibility? Thinking of going?

Ian Lloyd - 13th June 2003 11:30 - #
I read it once a month at hte most when i remember but never mind, wub ya skunkeh!
Tim Jackson (hux) - 13th June 2003 11:44 - #
Very Good, Simon. I've been reading you off and on for quite some time since you mentioned your blog on Sitepoint. Well done on your milestone. Aaron (Sketch)
Aaron Brazell - 13th June 2003 13:40 - #
Ditto to what Aaron said. Your blog has been a source of inspiration to me. The first blog I started got ditched because it didn't measure up :D Good luck in the next year mate, and see you around.
Jeremy C. Wright - 13th June 2003 13:52 - #
Forgot to mention this one - I had a kinda strange surreal moment back in March. I was sat in a panel presentation at SXSW 2003 and Leonard 'Randomfoo' Lin was sat next to me. No, that's not the strange thing. What was strange was that we were in Austin TX, yet I was just one of only a handful of people from UK - and I live just two junctions on the M4 away from you (Simon). I remember feeling proud on your behalf - that I could go across the Atlantic, and happen to sit down next to someone in a conference and spot them looking at something so geographically so close to me. I'm not sure I'm making this point very clearly. Ah, what the heck, it'll have to do :-p

Not quite as weird as travelling from UK to Aus, then travelling for just two days from Sydney up to Cairns and bumping into someone in a pub that works in the same office as you at work and not even knowing they were gonna be there. But that's another story.

Oh and yeah - congrats on year 1! :-)

Ian Lloyd - 13th June 2003 16:32 - #
Congratulations, and many more! I love that you were able to look back and find life lessons in your first year online.
zeldman - 13th June 2003 18:54 - #
Congrats, Simon! Been reading your blog since July/August, and it's the first in my "weblogs" bookmarks tab. (Which reminds me: s/Phoenix/Mozilla Firebird/ in the "Of Interest" section.)

And I'll chime in with #7: "Su blogroll es mi blogroll."

Jan! - 13th June 2003 19:30 - #
When re-reading the comments on your first post, I came up with an idea for a general "number of characters typed" counter for textareas. Some sites impose a limit on the number of characters you may type, but don't provide a counter. Here's a ridiculously large bookmarklet to fix that for any page containing a textarea:

javascript:var tas = document.getElementsByTagName('textarea'); for (var i = 0; i < tas.length; i++) { var ctr = document.createElement('div'); ctr.setAttribute('id', 'janTextAreaCounter-' + i); ctr.style.width = '40px'; ctr.style.height = '20px'; ctr.style.font = 'sans-serif 16px/20px'; ctr.style.textAlign = 'right'; ctr.style.border = '1px solid #ccc'; ctr.style.background = '#fff'; ctr.style.color = '#000'; ctr.style.position = 'absolute'; ctr.style.left = (tas[i].offsetLeft + tas[i].offsetWidth - 42) + 'px'; ctr.style.top = (tas[i].offsetTop + tas[i].offsetHeight) + 'px'; ctr.style.zIndex = 1024; ctr.appendChild(document.createTextNode(tas[i].val ue.length)); document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChi ld(ctr); tas[i].setAttribute('onkeydown', 'setTimeout("var ctr = document.getElementById(\\\"janTextAreaCounter-' + i + '\\\"); ctr.normalize(); ctr.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(document. getElementsByTagName(\\\"textarea\\\")[' + i + '].value.length), ctr.childNodes[0]);", 50); ' + tas[i].getAttribute('onkeydown')); } void(0)

Some remarks:
- Works in Mozilla and Opera 7. Doesn't work in IE. No idea about Mac browsers.
- I reckon it could be made smaller by using "with ctr.style"
- The positioning is a bit unpredictable in non-CSS sites. Don't really know why.
Jan! - 13th June 2003 19:46 - #
Congratulations! Keep up the educational and interesting posts. :)
Melissa - 13th June 2003 20:32 - #
Happy birthday! Keep up the good work :)
Breyten - 13th June 2003 21:05 - #
Yep. Has been a pretty good year for the blog and IRL. You forgot to mention driving a fair portion of your friends into Blogging :P

Swannie - 13th June 2003 21:39 - #
Well done, Dude. But it kills me that you haven't fixed that script error yet.
Simon Jessey - 13th June 2003 21:40 - #
I've just fixed it - it turns out IE has never heard of documents.createElementNS (which Mozilla needs instead of createElements if you are serving documents as application/xhtml).
Simon Willison - 14th June 2003 01:44 - #
Parabéns! Keep up the great work :-)
Ronaldo - 14th June 2003 02:22 - #
Congratulations. A very impressive review of the year. I knew there was a reason for you being in my blogroll :)
Paul Freeman - 14th June 2003 09:56 - #
Congrats!
JLT - 16th June 2003 18:05 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/06/12/oneYearOfBlogging

Simon Willison’s Weblog

One year of blogging

25 comments