Article
A happy birthday
March 24, 2004: The johnzeratsky.com weblog is one year old!
Since this day last year, I've written 217 posts and entertained 302 comments (although a bunch of those were from spammers). I've been online at this location since the summer of 2002, which is not really that long. In the meantime, I've been through three design iterations -- one static, two bloggy.
Here's the abbreviated history of johnzeratsky.com.
The original
For me, these were truly the good ol' days. I designed it in Photoshop, then sliced, diced and reassembled it in Adobe GoLive. I don't know if designing with CSS was a reality back then, but I certainly didn't know about it!
I always kind of liked this old site, and other people did too. One time, Suzy told me it was "beautiful," and then "exceptional." If not for those comments, I may not be a web designer today (thanks). This web site was very exciting for my parents and the rest of my family -- they appreciated the clean language and plentiful pictures. Guess I disappointed them in the end. To this day, I still get requests for "that old web site," so I've kept it around, color rollovers and all.
Blog beginnings
Thanks to a newfound passion for web design and a kick in the pants from Nick, I spent Spring Break 2003 wrestling MovableType into submission and designing a weblog template that always looked a little too much like Kottke's. Nevertheless, it worked, and I was pretty happy.
My first posts were short, frequent and highly reactive. I wrote a lot about Apple, a bit about the media, and begin to introduce some "inappropriate" content and vague political leanings that would really get my parents going. And if you substitute "Howard Dean" for "Gary Hart" on this early post, I almost sound prophetic! A fluke, I'm sure.
One time, David Sifry commented on a post of mine. That was cool.
Yes, you're seeing double
Now, we've gone from gray to green to blue. My writing is longer, more boring, and only interesting to people who know me. I'm dangerously close to becoming a photoblog. And although Michelle recently accused me of posting "every two weeks," I've actually fallen into a nice just-over-once-a-week rhythm.
One of these days I'll add archives, so you can get back and really explore the not-so-rich history of this site. Until then, use the folder view method. It's been a long, strange trip -- but I'm looking forward to year two.
Thanks for reading.
[note: This entry was posted to the future. Neato, huh?]