Results tagged “brain tags”

This is just a short post to commemorate the eleventh birthday of this blog. Eleven years ago I decided to post short notices on my personal site, not realizing that this habit would become very popular eleven years later. I still like it, and probably will continue blogging for a long time.

That is the question I have been asking myself a lot this year. In the past I always had a clear answer to this question, but lately I struggle with the aim of this site, which is why it has been very silent over here.

The first incarnation of Brain Tags was simply to inform my friends abroad about what was going on in my life, which was a very novel idea back in 1997.

The second incarnation of Brain Tags in 2001 still had the same aim, but intense due to my emigration to Spain.

After some years the content started shifting to include web design and other technology topics. I got settled in Spain, and my daily life was not so interesting anymore...

And now that blogging has become very mainstream (my wifes mobile phone comes with a blogging client installed!) and there are a thousand blogs writing essentially the same, I wonder what the place of Brain Tags is.

For a while I thought about closing Brain Tags, but then I decided that I do have a very clear and sometimes unique opinion about many subjects. So I do want to continue writing here, but probably in a different format. I think that shorter articles with some original thinking (less copying/forwarding stuff from others) will be the way to go. I will also incorporate som other things such as Twitter steams etc. in the blog design.

Be prepared for changes, Brain Tags is alive!

On November 9, 1997 I added a new section to my personal web site: a news page. The word weblog did not exist yet, but my news page (though updated manually in FrontPage) did have some aspects of modern day weblogs; it showed the entries in reverse chronological order, but did not allow for comments.

The first entries are written in Dutch, but as I got more foreign friends I changed my personal site to English. The old news however, always stayed in Dutch...

A lot have changed in those ten years. Not only in my life, but also the weblog. It went through several designs, three domains, two content management tools, and had both active periods and inactive periods.

As I had very few readers in the beginning (I still remember the day I had 10 visitors) I doubt there is anybody who have been following Brain Tags since those early days. It doesn't matter whether you read this blog recently or for a long time, I wouldn't have continued that long without my readers. So I would like to use the opportunity to thank you all!

The coming days I will look back in more detail on the pas ten years.

After reading the lifehacker desktop blog editor comparison I decided to give performancing for Firefox a try. I am a happy user of Ecto (number three in the comparison), but the performancing editor has WYSIWYG functionality, as well as Technorati and del.icio.us integration.

So I installed the plugin, and am now writing the first post in my new editor. So far I like it. It is easy to use, and it has more than enough functionality.