Ten years of blogging

Posted 12 November 2022
Tagged with blogging-about-blogging

I bought the alexwlchan.net domain on November 8th, 2012, and the first web page would have appeared shortly after that (but the exact date is lost to history). This means I’ve been writing at alexwlchan.net for about a decade.

The site looks very different now to how it started. This is the oldest screenshot I have of the homepage, compared to how it looks today:

A website with a dark blue stripe across the top, which has my name and some horizontal navigation. Below is a post titled ‘Automatic Pinboard backups’, which goes straight into the post text, and on the right is a sidebar with a list of recent posts.

A website with a bright green stripe across the top, with my name and horizontal navigation (albeit different links). Below is a large, colour photo of me in a matching green dress and smiling at the camera, and below that is some introductory text that starts “Hi, I’m Alex”, rather than jumping straight into a blog post.

The changes in the site are nothing compared to how much I’ve changed in that time. My life is radically different, and mostly for the better. I’ve changed jobs, made new friends, lived in several places, transitioned my gender, and plenty more besides. I’m happier and more comfortable in myself, in a way I’m not sure my 2012 self even knew was possible.

It’s hard to remember why I originally wanted a personal website, but whatever the reason I’m super glad I did. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out.

I’ve written a lot of posts that I’m proud of, and I’ve become a better writer as a result. I’ve learnt new things, both in the writing process and in feedback from readers. I’ve received dozens of nice messages from people who’ve read and enjoyed the site, which are always a delight.

The words aside, it’s also been cool to write the HTML and CSS that goes around them. I have complete control over how this site looks and works, and it’s full of small details and design flourishes that are there just because they make me happy. I can do wacky and weird things that just aren’t possible on big social media sites.

Everything on the site is something I find fun or interesting. These are a few of my favourites:

2016: Tiling the plane with Pillow – the first time I used programming to draw pictures, but definitely not the last.
2017: A visit to the Crossness pumping station
2017: Adventures in Python with concurrent.futures – I write a lot of posts to help me understand a tricky concept, and this is one I revisit regularly.
2019: Reading a Chinese dictionary / 读一本中文字典
2019: Getting a tint colour from an image with Python and k‑means
2020: Illustrating lifecycle transitions in Amazon S3 – which includes an idea which went on to be used in the official AWS documentation (!).
2020: Maths is about facing ambiguity, not avoiding it
2021: Drawing inner/outer strokes in SVG (clips and masks) – another post where I was writing to help me understand something. I’m particularly pleased with the examples.
2022: “Fixing” the rules of division – I enjoyed drawing the Moomin illustrations.

Making this site brings me joy, so I’m going to keep doing it. Let’s see if I make it another ten years.