I recently saw some discussions on line about people mentioning they’d been blogging for 20 or 25 years and it got me thinking.

How long have I been blogging?

My page famously claims “since 1995” - I’m fairly certain that’s about when I created my first personal web page which lived at http://teesa.com/~roadmr (https was incredibly arcane and hard to set up back then). I don’t remember what it contained; Sadly the Internet Archive has no record of this page’s original content; this could be because the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine wasn’t launched until May 1996!

The only snapshots of that URL are from May, 1997; by then it already only contained a “We Moved” link pointing to what would be my home page for the next decade, at least: http://www.entropia.com.mx/~roadmr. Even if the first snapshot of that page in Wayback Machine is from December, 1998, it can be seen that I’ve demonstrably had at least a form of web page since 1997.

My page looked like this for maybe 5 years, being basically a collection of pages and links with no chronology.

The first appearance of an actual blog-like format is in 2002. I used a PHP application called Personal Weblog. I didn’t (and still don’t) blog much, so this choice of tooling was reasonable for what I wrote, which were short-length snippets reminiscent of what would later become “twitter”.

Eventually, if I remember correctly, I nuked all the files in an accident and decided to go for broke and install Wordpress, which I did in November 2005. I continued to use Wordpress consistently, even after the move to my new URL https://www.tomechangosubanana.com in 2006; indeed the last Wayback Machine snapshot of http://www.entropia.com.mx/~roadmr dates from sometime in 2005-2006.

I’ve managed to keep / migrate all my content since then, so my first Wordpress post can still be seen here; only it’s now stored as static content which is rendered by Hugo, to which I migrated in 2021, after 16 years on Wordpress.

So by the above and my calculations:

• Had a web page since 1995 (28 years at time of writing)
• If you don’t want to believe that claim and prefer to go with the provable that I’ve had a web page since 1997, that’s fine by me :) it’s still 26 years at time of writing.
• Been blogging since 2002 (21 years at time of writing).
• Been on the same URL since 2006 (17 years at time of writing).