Rubenerd

Yikes. I’m so tempted to leave it at that.

Ten years ago, I’d just left high school, applied to university, and had no fucking clue what I’d be doing, who I’d be, even where I’d be living. For all the certainty about my career path my sister envied, the future was still terrifyingly blurry, yet reassuringly distant. What would change, what would stay the same?

Out of that awkward, melodramatic haze we all go through during that time, I decided to start a blog podcast RSS-able site thing. 2004 was an exciting time to enter the blogging world; you could hear the enthusiasm in those classic BloggerCon talks; tools like Radio UserLand and Movable Type were all the rage. RSS was the decentralised future (well, unless you used FeedBurner).

Ten years on, there are 4102 posts (of which I’m proud of a dozen). 2011 and August 2006 were my most prolific year and month respectively. The domain has changed twice; once because of a dodgy webhost, and back to here again. 100+ posts were lost in a database wipe. I’ve made more friends through this than I thought possible. Of my regrets, I should have written more about what I loved (rather than what angered me), and that I didn’t start sooner.

Introspection isn’t my strong suit, so I’ll let 18 year old me finish this post. I looked about the same, just with blonder hair and no panda eyes:

Well here it is: my first blog entry on this new platform. When I set up Rubenerd all those centuries ago it never really had a purpose, in all honesty is was always a website that just had random stuff on it that I either thought was groovy, weird etc. Now it’s a blog site with random stuff on it that I think is groovy, weird etc.

I’ve kept a log at home for some time now, I think my first entry dates back to around 1999, but just in the last 2 years I’ve been a lot more involved and my entries have been progressively getting bigger and bigger. I don’t know, but the idea of keeping a record of my life, however dull it is, might be fun to look at in years gone by!

Anyway I was finding that I was writing some pretty involved stuff and I thought that maybe one percent of it, or maybe two, might be useful to someone, especially with respect to some of the tech problems I’ve had and solved over the years. So here it is.

I hope you find this site useful or at the very least good material for whatever you want to do. I had a podcast going for a while but for the time being my Webserver is simply too small to accommodate them. Maybe in the future I’ll take it up again.

Happy holidays!

Thanks everyone for all your support over the years. See you in 2024 :).