I started blogging in September 2003, when Apple was giving away the blogging tool iBlog so that .Mac members could use their iDisk to host a blog. Over the years the blog changed as I experimented with different blogging software and platforms and I tended to delete the old blogs as I moved on. I sometimes regretted doing that, but many of the posts were so banal and cringe-makingly awful, that it was probably for the best (I would often post items for the sake of it rather than if I thought I had something worthwhile to say). But I have kept archives of them all.
Not surprisingly, the blogs have not been particularly successful in terms of readership - especially in recent years - but the most successful period was in August 2004 during the Olympics when I posted a few pictures of the swimmer Amanda Beard (I was fascinated by her amazing teeth, among other things) and women's volleyball. That coupled with another post which featured the word "nude" was picked up by the search engines, such that people searching for "nude pictures of Amanda Beard" found my blog. At one point I was getting a visitor each second.
After my recent problems with a self-hosted WordPress blog and its successful migration to Blogger, I decided to look back at the archived stuff with a view to incorporating some of the less banal content into the current blog; and that's what I've done. I have also added a few posts retrospectively - I'm not sure if it's the "done" thing, but there were one or two events that I wish I'd written up at the time.
I didn't consider the original Amanda Beard/women's volleyball post worthy of resurrecting, but here I've included one of the pictures I used.
