This blog is 8 years old today. I posted my first entry on June 10th, 2003 and have added a total of 548 more since then, averaging one post every 5 and a half days. My posting rate has gone down over the last couple of years as I’ve started concentrating more on my photoblog but this site has become a great vehicle for long-form posts and tutorials that don’t fit well with the photoblog format.

Looking back over the early posts, it’s clear that a great deal of water has passed under the bridge since I started writing. I’ve posted goodbyes to my mother and my wife’s step-father, news of the construction of our home, a job change, first days at school, trips to Guatemala, hints at my first forays into HDR and reports after teaching HDR workshops, pictures at an exhibition, news of our family vacations (and here, and here, and here) and umpteen other unrelated, though interesting or topical, snippets.

Although the focus has definitely shifted very much more towards photography over the last 3 or 4 years, I’ll try to keep the content varied moving forward. The older the blog gets, the more I am delighted I started it all those years ago since, as my memory becomes increasingly unreliably, it’s great to have this continuous stream of family history to look back through and refresh the neurons with.

Another 4 hours work this evening has convinced me that moving to WordPress was a good idea. The administration panels are so easy to use and the online documentation so extensive that I managed to figure out how to edit the site style sheets, add appropriate widgets and plug-ins and get my masthead back to normal in the space of one evening. I had one shock which was likely self-inflicted when I mistakenly changed the root URL of the blog and caused me to have to manually edit the database to get things back to normal, but, aside from that, things were pretty much plain sailing.

The only outstanding problem I now have is that I can’t add the blog to Flickr for some reason. I used to be able to post directly from Flickr to the old blog but when I enter the details for the new one, Flickr tells me that the userid and password are not correct (they definitely are).  More research required here but, in the meantime, I can just cut and paste HTML chunks from Flickr into the WordPress editor window.

Now to set up my wife’s new blog too…