Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

This post is a major milestone in my blogging journey as it is the 1000th published post on the blog and its been exactly 15 years since I first started blogging on 1st Oct 2004. I was in two minds about waiting till Oct to make this post as that would mean another 2-3 week gap in the blog but then after talking with Jani I decided to wait as its better to make a combined post about the milestones than two separate posts about similar topics. When I started Blogging it was in the golden age of Blogging where pretty much everyone had a blog, in-fact there was actually a blog that was supposedly posted by a dog and each post was basically ‘woof woof’ repeated a few hundred times.

Initially I was a bit hesitant to start a blog as I had a website that I updated regularly so didn’t really see the use of a blog but then Surabhi created a sandwich that I had to share it with others and my post on one of the most bizarre sandwiches I have seen anyone eat: A Peanut butter + Marshmallow + chocolate syrup + Banana sandwich started my blogging journey. Initially I had a goal of making a blog post everyday and for a long time I did manage to keep that schedule but as I started working and things changed this schedule was harder to keep and there have been months when I didn’t post anything and there have been days when I posted multiple times.

Its been an interesting journey so far and now Blogging is something only very few diehard users do as most people have stopped blogging and instead post on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram etc. I still prefer to use a self hosted service as over here I have complete control over my setup. I decide what to post and what comment to allow, its not on a third party system that might just decide to shutdown or remove my posts or maybe just loose some of it (Refer to the lost music from MySpace). I do post the link to the postings on social media usually using an automated service or hacked together scripts but the main text/post is on a system that I control.

Self hosting was a major criteria for selecting the blogging software I was going to use and the first iteration of the blog was running on Serendipity which is a PHP-powered weblog engine. Initially I was quite happy with the software but then it turned out to be too resource intensive for my barebones VPS setup that was hosting suramya.com at the time and required constant hand holding so in June 2005 I migrated to WordPress and have been a happy user of WP since then. If I remember correctly the migration was done by a collection of scripts that I downloaded and then customized.

Over the years, I have posted about a very random set of topics and to no ones surprise I mostly posted about My Life, Thoughts and Techie stuff. The full breakdown of posts by category is as follows (Please note that a post can be tagged to multiple categories):

It took me 15 years to reach 1000 posts, but my goal is to reach the next 1000 posts a lot faster and now thanks to Jani constantly motivating (read as nagging 🙂 ) me to post regularly I think that I will be making posts more frequently on the blog. One major item in the To Do list for the blog is to install a skin/theme that is mobile friendly. A large population of users is accessing the blog via mobile and the current setup is not the most mobile friendly version as I had selected it when web browsing on mobile was rare and mostly text based.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya