Today is the 20th anniversary of my first ‘proper’ blogpost. I say ‘proper’ because I had previously used Blogpost for match reports from the debut season of ‘Golden Hill Sunday F.C.’ (which was also the last full season I managed) – this is thankfully long since lost.

I had bought a Nokia E61 (basically a Blackberry clone looks wise) which came with the Nokia Lifeblog software and an out of the box connection to Typepad.com. I initially played around just publishing phone photos directly to the blog but 20 years ago today I sat down and wrote a couple of work related paragraphs and the rest is history.

It is also an early example of the classic blogger trope that has served me so well – blogging about blogging.

The particularly wonderful thing about this particular blogpost is that I actually pretty much made the idea happen – give or take. I managed to convince the powers that be at Jisc that it was a worthwhile idea, secured some funding and with the help of Netsight (early stalwarts of the Bristol digital scene), and especially Rick Hurst, I launched Jisc Involve – a blog network for all the projects, programmes, events and activity that Jisc funded. Something that still exists to this day. It was based on the very first version of WordPress Multi-site from what I can remember and it was no easy task getting it up and running. Funnily enough Rick works for Automattic (home of WordPress) now I think!

This was also, along with Jisc Answers (that became Delib’s Dialogue product) that I was working on in parallel, the first time I really product managed anything. So it has a lot of answer for!

So here we are 20 years later and I am still blogging away – something like 1000 posts later – trying to recreate anything this influential 😂.

Onwards (until the AI overlords replace us all).