If you are a technically-minded user, you may also be wondering why I chose to go with WordPress versus my own blog that I wrote a couple of years back. The answer to that is both “interoperability” and “functionality”. Since we are going overseas soon (I’m sure you’re all aware of that now), I wanted an easy way to update while away.

WordPress has an email-to-blog function which means all I need to do is to send an email, wait a bit, and have it posted. I’m sure I could have coded it myself, but it would have taken a while and WordPress already has it. There are a bunch of other great features I’ve introduced including Gravatars (which allows you to have a picture beside your comments), Flickr integration (whenever I post a photo from Flickr, the data is read as well as the comments on that photo — this is my attempt to integrate both my blog and photoblog) and a bunch of other stuff designed to make it easier to get in, read what you want and find more content that makes you want to stick around.

At this point, I will step back and give a quick history of bludger.org, since the old site will soon come offline and I won’t have pictures of it any more; indeed, I only have pictures of the most recent versions of the site.

• 2000 – bludger.org is registed primarily for me to have an email address I never have to change again.
• Early 2001 – The first blog is created, though I didn’t know it as a blog then. A gaudy bright orange and dark blue colour scheme are used (based on a Microsoft Access database running with ASP, hosted at www.brinkster.com).
• Late 2001 – The site switches to mike.bludger.org as I’d decided to create a “global” website and a personal one. As well as a blog, it also had book, movie and restaurant reviews (still on Microsoft Access and ASP).
• 2002 – 2003 – Not a lot of blogging goes on, but I was attempting to revamp mike.bludger.org. It never really materialised.
• Early 2004 – My first use of software I didn’t make. I used PHPNuke after setting up a Linux server at home. The server was a paltry P133 and couldn’t really handle running Apache, mySQL and PHPNuke together.
• Mid 2004 – After 4-6 months of using PHPNuke I decided to again build my own site. I used mySQL and PHP this time and created a simple site with a “blog of doom” and “links of peril”. A dark blue colour scheme with the first appearance of the couch.
• Late 2004 – I decided to recode the entire blog from scratch as blogs are becoming more popular and I decide to make my blog more “blog like”.
  
• 2005 – A few problems with the style sheet on the new site prompt me to change the look and feel again. These problems are mostly due to Internet Explorer’s poor handling of transparencies.
  
• 2006 – A small visual refresh of the look/feel to the site.
  
  
• 2007 – (Where we are now) I install WordPress, create my own custom Flickr integration using PHPFlickr as well as creating my own custom WordPress theme.
  

This is actually not the first time I have installed WordPress. I installed it late in 2006 with the intention to moving across and using lots of AJAXifications, but became bored with the look and feel of the site I’d come up with.

Getting the data in posed a problem, as I had to take my data from my database and change it around to suit the database structure for WordPress. Since I’ve done plenty of database stuff both at home and work, it wasn’t particularly taxing but was time-consuming. Speaking of time consuming, I went through every single post and painstakingly added tags to each one. Some are better tagged than others, but they’re all there.

Since I have been working mostly on this site, I decided to simply ignore my other site. I was updating both simultaneously for a while, but thought getting you to read a number of older posts might be a good way to get you to explore the site.

So there you have it! Explore, enjoy and let me know what you think.

Last year, a Microsoft employee posted (on his personal blog) a photo of a stack of G5s arriving at a Microsoft office. A few days later, the guy was fired; the termination was a direct result of the earlier post.

Earlier this year, an employee of Friendster just happened to make two posts regarding what work she’d done at Friendster. A couple of weeks later, she too was fired.

More recently, Sun’s CEO’s personal blogging regarding HP’s business strategies has landed him into some trouble with HP sending a nasty letter. Of course, Sun isn’t going to back down (I wonder what they’d have done if it wasn’t their CEO?) and responded telling HP to get stuffed.

A bit worrying really; I can see the reasons for the actions taken against the (now) ex-employees but to be honest they’re a bit over-the-top and I’d hate to ever be in such a position just for writing my opinion.