Back in the year 2004, blogs had yet to hit the big time yet and we’re not mainstream. Blogging software like Blogger, WordPress and others were either not available or still in their extreme infancy.

I like to think I jumped on the blogging bandwagon fairly early on and for me to do so back in 2004 I created my blog by rolling my own software.

As you read through my entries you see a steady progression of features being added to my blog that now-days we take for granted. For example, comments, post timezones, navigation of articles (next/previous/search), categories, and much more.

I started by posting static-html before gradually backing the articles with a database. It took quite a bit of my spare time to get stickfly up and running from scratch and it was a great learning experience for me. However, as the years passed blogging platforms arose and it became easier to migrate my blog across to my chosen platform WordPress rather than struggle to utilize my spare time programming new features to keep my own software up-to-date.

Reading through the stickfly entries in 2004 you can see a primary focus for me was to build a community. I was constantly searching for others to author posts and was incessantly canvassing my readership to leave comments. How the focus of my blog has changed over the years. A lot of personal blogs have left to die and replaced by micro-blogging sites (facebook, twitter) and in the cases where they haven’t you can see they are kept now more as a personal diary to record more detailed experiences close to the authors heart.

I’m now looking forward to revisiting what the year 2005 was to me.

I’ve been struggling to find a way to reconcile updating my blog against updating the latest social platforms like facebook and twitter.

It’s ever so easy to post to facebook with small micro-updates and give up on the more full-experience entries that a blog can provide and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last year or two.

This was all well and good until I decided to revisit my facebook updates. It’s not easy. Facebook and twitter are meant to be a “what’s going on right now” platform and don’t provide you with mechanisms to sift through your archived content easily. Plus, you don’t get to control the content – they do. So with these two obstacles preventing me from owning and reviewing my own updates I’ve decided to go back to updating my blog.

As part of my new initiative, I am revisiting each entry I’ve ever posted and reviewing it for broken links, missing photo albums, spelling/grammar mistakes and I’m also re-categorizing my entries. This process takes a long time. I’m aiming to update a month of entries per day. This is currently taking me 90 mins – 2 hours.

Today I’m proud to say that I’ve completed the review of my first year’s worth of blog entries. Check out my 2004 and all its glory here.

I’ve also started fixing up and uploading photo albums to my flickr account. Check them out here.