After a few years running a blog under a different web address when I first moved to Switzerland, I dumped the site and stopped publishing personal stuff for a while. I missed it, though, and decided to get a new site up and running in 2006. Today marks the thirteenth anniversary of that first post, which featured a black-and-white scanned photo from nine years earlier.

Au Musée du Louvre, photographed in 1997

There has been much water under the bridge since then. After (coincidentally) thirteen years running a Flickr account, I migrated all of my photos from that account into this website earlier this year. That means that the site now contains 9,538 blog posts, categorised in 3,471 “topics”. The photos, each of which is a “blog post” of its own, are grouped into 7,015 collections.

Although social media channels finally put paid to any chance of getting regular comments on the site, there are still over 700 of them nestled alongside their respective posts.

I built the current WordPress Theme using the basis which I and the team at a former employer developed and I’ve been working on it from time to time since August last year, with getting on for 100 individual changes and improvements.

Having gone great guns at Say Hello in the past eight months, I’m planning to completely re-build a new Theme using the Gutenberg technology which we’ve developed, switching to the block editor for a better layout and multimedia elements, as well as using CSS Grid to its full extent. I’m also going to make a concerted effort to improve the site structure, to make it more easy to find and navigate through the huge amount of content.

Aside from all the technical stuff which I’ve learned over the past thirteen years, I’ve also enjoyed sharing so much. I’ve tried stopping from time to time, but blogging has been such a large part of my life for so many years, I’d feel bereft without it.

One response to “Lucky Thirteen”

  1. Mum avatar
    Mum

    Happy Anniversary Mark

    I look forward to the new incarnation

    Xx

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