5 Years ago Today

Exactly five years ago today, I created this blog. Happy fifth birthday, Mitch’s Blog!

The internet has changed a lot since that day five years ago. Back then, almost nobody aside from the early-adopters of new technology had any idea of what a blog was. Blogs had not yet gone mainstream; the media treated them as a new, obscure internet invention that only a margin of those using the internet would probably ever make use of.

Indeed, I would have never known what a blog was or had heard about Blogger back then either if I hadn’t been an ardent viewer of Tech TV, the (now-defunct) cable-tv channel that was devoted to computers, the internet, and technology in general. Blogs had gotten a lot of acclaim on the channel back in 2001, and a seemingly large majority of the channel’s fans and hosts had a personal blog by the end of that year. A couple days before Christmas, I decided to join the herd and get one too.

Few people know this, but the original reason I started this blog was to communicate with family. Although I did want to be able to create entries that resembled emails, what I really wanted to do was share things such as photos and videos. The septillion photo and video sharing websites that are around now weren’t around at the time. I figured starting a blog to achieve this would be a whole lot easier than the alternative of starting an entire website from scratch. Naturally, I was correct.

Blogger has certainly come a long way since 2001 as well. Although it was well-known at the time among those who had heard about blogs, running a blog using Blogger wasn’t exactly seen as the most desirable thing to do. Instead, if you had the programming know-how (and, in general, the money to spare for website hosting), you would implement a proprietary blog publishing system like the one called Movable Type. This was because the service provided by Blogger was as bare-bones as possible. RSS feeds were unheard of, and, although it's hard to believe now, it wasn’t even possible to leave comments on individual entries. Additionally, hosting your blog with Blogspot meant that you had to deal with a barrage of popup and other unsavory ads.

Of course, Blogger has added a lot of useful features and become much better since then. Both blogs and blogging in general have also gained widespread notoriety and ubiquity. Through it all, though, this blog, the one without a witty name (witty names are another thing that weren’t very common in 2001) has been here. With any luck, I hope to have this blog going strong for another five years and for many more pentads* after that!

* Among other things, a pentad is a period of five years