Today at 14:07, sixteen years ago I published my first blogpost. The first few months I posted on Blogger, but after 6 months, deciding having a blog was no longer just an experiment, I moved to my own domain and where it has since resided. First it was hosted at a server I ran from my home, later I moved to a hosting package for more reliability.

Interestingly in that first blogpost only the links to personal domains still work, all the others have since become obsolete. Radio Userland no longer exists, nor does the Knowledge Board platform that I mention and even refer to as a place to find out more about me. In my first blogpost I also link to an image that was hosted on my server at home, using the subdomain name my internet provider gave me back then. That provider was sold in 2006 and that subdomain name no longer exists either. Blogger itself does still exist and even keeps my old Blogger.com blog alive. But Google has of course shown frequently they can and do kill services at short notice, or suspend your account.

The only original link in that first posting that still works is the one to David Gurteen’s blog hosted on his own domain gurteen.com, and his blogpost actually preserves some of the things I wrote at the now gone Knowledge Board. Although the original link to Lilia’s blogpost on Radio Userland no longer works, I could repair the link because she moved to her own domain in the same week I launched my blog. The link to Seb’s Radio Userland site has been preserved in archive.org. Which goes to say: if you care about your own data, your own writing, your own journal of thoughts, you need to be able to control the way your creative output can be accessed online. Otherwise it’s just a bit of content that serves as platform fodder.

So in a sense my very first blogpost in hindsight is a ringing endorsement for the IndieWeb principle of staying in control of your stuff. That goes further than having your own domain, but it’s a key building block.

Last year the anniversary of this blog coincided with leaving Facebook and returning to writing in this space more. That certainly worked out. Maybe I should use this date to yearly reflect on how my online behaviours do or don’t aid my networked agency.