Saturday morning project — 2004

I've completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren't necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs.

It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much more I was focused on writing, presumeably the reason for a blog called Writelife. I think that is why I have fifteen posts there even though I want to try to keep each year to ten or less.

The second thing I noticed is how focused I was on blogging whereas now my focus is social media (blogging being a subset of). But that was six years ago when blogging was really taking off and there was so much discussion about blogs and what they were, as well as the criticisms -- more or less the same as now with social media.

Two posts were of particular interest to me. One of them was 12 rules for Web writing which was actually a repost of something I'd written around ten years ago, about 2000 or so. Back then I was a bit anal about the word web and capitalizing it. Now, I don't care. The rules, by the way, are more or less obvious ones -- there are no great insights, I think. What I find interesting, however, is that by and large I think they're still valid. (Now that I think of it, maybe some of them weren't so obvious back in 2000.)

The other post is Language as a communication barrier. For a very long time it was my most visited post. What is of interest in that is where that traffic was coming from -- outside of North America to a great extent. Africa, Pacific Rim etc.

Finally, many of the posts from back then have character set problems due to the many WordPress updates and the importing of the blog from another location. (That importing business is also why some of the internal links go nowhere. It is simply too time consuming to go through and fix the URLs.) Although I tried to clean up the fifteen posts here, my posts from back then often show code rather than an apostrophe, quotation mark and so on.

If you're at all interested, you'll find the fifteen posts on my Highlights page, just below 2009. Other years will hopefully be coming soon.