I begin with a warning: I've had a few glasses of wine. I don't often write after a few glasses of wine, because I don't often drink. But I make an exception today because we are at the start of watching the last ever episode of Alias (our TV free month interrupted our watching of the last season on DVD, which I bought Chris for Christmas)* and Mikaela has woken up. Chris is soothing her back to sleep (I hope) so I need to entertain myself. And I have so many blog posts waiting to be written. Of course, I can't remember what any of them are....
For some reason I went back today and read the first post recorded here on Typepad, from about 20 January 2000. It wasn't the first post I ever wrote, it's just the first one I imported to Typepad (because I imported all the ones in my old pregnancy and pre-conception archive and that was the entry I wrote when I first bought the book Natural Fertility). But as I was reading it I was struck by the difference in tone and style to 'modern' blog posts. It was more an online journal post, which is what I called it back then, in the days when online journals and blogs were two significantly different creatures. It was more rambling, not thematised. Instead of starting a new post about a new topic I just popped in an asterisk and a para break and off I went.
Not that that's un-heard of today, but the format was more 'today's journal entry' than a particular topic like a blog post of today tends to be.
But what also astounded me (although I haven't forgotten, not really), was the change in technology. I refered to having to go back online, before going to bed, to check out the correct links to put in the entry, to check my email, and to ftp the entry to my server. And then I realised that I had to go back to the last entry and the index to add links to this new post. Yes people, I was updating all those links by hand. There was no CSS, there was no CMS - it was all done by hand in Dreamweaver, or, depending where I was, directly in the code in Notepad. It's not that long that I've had broadband, and even less time that I've had wireless broadband, but it seems like it's always been this way. To go back to dialup... I don't even want to think about it. But to go back to pre-CMS days? That's unthinkable!
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*this is why I make an exception to blogging while somewhat inebriated, not to why I've had half a bottle of wine. That's another story and probably a boring one (something to do with opportunity - a bottle open - and nothing else very interesting), so I'm not going to tell it here.
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