Twenty years of running a blog – Eli Bendersky’s web site
This weblog has now been operating for 20 years!
Twenty years… a big chunk of a human’s grownup life; whereas so
many issues in my life have modified since Might 2003, the weblog has remained a
fixed companion. This milestone impressed me to do some archaeology utilizing the
superb Wayback Machine. It did not have the very
first put up, however I dug up one from only a week or so later – a book review.
Here is the way it appeared on http://use.perl.org/~spur/journal/ (this hyperlink is lengthy
useless, after all) in Might 2003:
Once I wrote an replace on the 10 year mark, the weblog
appeared like this:
The seems – together with the internet hosting and the software program used to generate and run the
weblog – modified in September 2014, and the
weblog has had roughly the present format ever since.
I’ve made some changes to the infrastructure – feedback outgrew their
usefulness and have been turned off in 2018.
To additional scale back dependencies on
third-party providers and make the weblog sooner and extra self-contained,
weblog analytics have been switched to make use of a light-weight self-hosted answer earlier
this year.
Some infrastructure modifications and upgrades have been occurring from time to time,
however these are utterly clear for readers. In any other case, it has been going
fairly regular.
Downtime has been exceedingly uncommon, and the weblog’s serving of static HTML
proved to be strong and resilient to spikes – together with many HN storms and
“hug of demise” makes an attempt. It is a nice enchancment from the earlier
Wordpress-on-BlueHost strategy, which struggled with uptime, particularly in occasions
of load.
The weblog has been averaging ~25 posts per 12 months previously 10 years, with
one thing like 100,000 month-to-month visits. The content material has shifted with
my pursuits, from a deal with C++ and Python to extra Go content material with a mixture of
Rust and different new applied sciences like WebAssembly.
As earlier than, massive due to all my devoted readers. Reader suggestions has all the time
been a spotlight of the running a blog expertise. I’ve no intention of stopping,
however can this weblog actually attain its thirtieth birthday? Solely the long run will inform.