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First there was the website (well, I actually skipped ahead several chapters in the history of the universe, but that's a convenient starting point for the current discussion). Then came the blog...
When blogging first began to take off, in the early years of the 21st century, the phenomenon largely passed me by. Not too many years later, I was getting quite into homebrewing and decided that it would be useful to keep some notes on what I was up to. I thought that a blog might be quite a useful way to keep them organised and would enable other people to read about my experiences too, if anyone was interested (unlikely, I admit). After a brief search around the then-available blog hosting options, I found a free service (Blogger) that seemed quite suitable to my needs and thus my Homebrew Blog was born on 1st January 2005.
It fairly quickly became apparent that I wasn't doing enough brewing to sustain a blog and the stream of entries quickly slowed (dig that oxymoron!) to a trickle, with a few non-brewing related posts creeping in later in the year. The following January I took up knitting and again decided that this might be worth sharing with the world, so I resurrected my blog as a Homebrew Knitblog (same URL as before). For a while most of the entries were about knitting, since my brewing activity was fairly minimal at the time, but since I'd now officially broken the barrier of a single-subject blog it quickly began to diversify to other topics as well. However, the pace of blogging soon dropped off again, partly because I found the website interface for the blog fairly clunky. In fact, I stopped adding to that blog altogether round about May 2006.
In the meantime I'd started a couple of other blogs, also powered by Blogger. The first, entitled Cymraeg Am Byth ("Welsh For Ever"), was my small contribution to combat the dominance of English on the Internet by writing a blog in Welsh. From the very start it was a random collection of mostly short musings, written entirely in Welsh. It is no longer extant, and I'm not sure quite what happened to it. The second blog was based on a suggestion I read somewhere to try writing a simple blog in a language you are learning. In my case, the blog started out in Esperanto but quickly switched to Spanish, as my attention shifted to that language. I forget what it was called initially, but when the language changed it got renamed (somewhat ironically, or perhaps accurately) No hablo español ("I don't speak Spanish"). Unlike the other blogs the aim here was simply to write short articles, sometimes no more than a sentence or two, to practice my Spanish writing skills. I fairly soon gave up on that one too, although it is still (as of this writing) accessible.
Towards the end of 2006 I came across a perl script called Blosxom that enables you to publish a blog as a series of text files, using the directory hierarchy to impose a structure on the blog. I decided to resurrect my main blog yet again, but this time using Blosxom and hosting it directly on my website. The new blog, renamed simply M-Space Blog as it was now part of M-Space (my website), was launched on 31st December 2006, just in time for the new year, and it is the blog you are currently reading. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with my ISP's server that prevented some of the features such as RSS syndication from working properly. Fortunately my brother, who had set up a Blosxom-based blog on his website (and was probably the one who told me about the system), had no such troubles with his server and was able to find me some space on there from which to host my blog.
By now you'll doubtless have noticed the pattern that my blog seems to change at the start of every new year, so you may be wondering what's in store for it this time. As it happens, I'm not planning any major changes to the structure of the blog although I do hope to be a bit more regular (and frequent) in my blogging next year. A bigger change should be coming soon in the "parent" M-Space website (although it's not strictly a parent as the blog is now hosted elsewhere), which I haven't done much work on for the last couple of years. I'm currently in the process of revamping it, using some techniques which I've developed while working on my church website, and hope to have the new version online soon. But I wouldn't hold your breath...
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