Simon Willison’s Weblog

One year of blogging

12th June 2003

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.