6 years of sloanie.com

I couldn’t let today pass without doing something to acknowledge the sloanie.com blog turning 6 years old. I wasn’t the first person ever to blog, but it wasn’t nearly as common back then. In March of 2002, I bought my first digital camera, the Canon Powershot S40. I was inspired by a blog that’s now defunct called hunkabutta.com, which was a blog by a Canadian living in Japan with his family. This guy carried a camera with him everywhere and always had really interesting images he’d include with his blog posts, whether they were related to the content of the blog post or not. I thought it was way cool– posting photos and having one’s own domain name on the web.

So on April 27, 2002, I launched sloanie.com with this first post sharing a view from my apartment window in Provo and stating the purpose for the blog. I knew I wanted to take pictures and post them to the blog… other than that, the sky was the limit. It’s been a fun six years of miscellaneous posting… some things funny, some things meaningful, some things pointless… anything I wanted.

Back in 2002 I created every entry from scratch. I did build a
template which I used for each post or group of posts, but there was
nothing so  simple as movable type or blogger to just allow me to enter
raw text and have
it formatted automatically. It’s kinda like how
in the olden days they had to set type on printing presses manually
whereas today we can type set much more rapidly all digitally, hehe.
But it was a labor of love, a creative outlet.

In 2003 I had
a brief affair with blogger, until I changed servers in July of 2003
and decided to use something a little more robust called Movable Type
(an ironic name in the context of my above analogy regarding printing
presses), which I’ve been using since.

I haven’t been the most
prolific blogger…hehe. Long time readers might remember times when I
went weeks or even months without updating, and even replaced my blog
temporarily with one of those flash games (I think it was the orca slap
game) for a long time. I have friends and relatives who haven’t been
blogging nearly as long, but have far outpaced me with regards to the
number of posts (I’ll have to see how many posts total there are once I
get the old, hand-made posts converted to this system. Total this site
probably has 450-500 posts… my friend Josh started his blog summer of 2003 and hit 500 posts on July 12, 2006, hehe…)

In
any case, I intend to keep blogging, and to even start a couple other
blogs for more specific endeavors. Though I’ve at one point or another
killed off some of my readership, there are a few people who still come
here, so thanks for visiting and contributing your comments to
sloanie.com 🙂

(I had intended this weekend to get the rest of my 2002–and the earlier
half of 2003– uploaded to the site to commemorate, but alas, it didn’t
happen. I’ll try to do that over the course of the coming weeks, for my
own sake. (I did load the first post up, as you can see)).