Five Years

29-05-2011

Five years ago today I posted the first ever entry onto The Bauble, with exactly no clue what I wanted the site to be. A blog? A location to vent? A pet project to keep me occupied in the evenings? Literally I had no idea. I sat down and started to play around with some code and designs and on May 29th 2007 posted this.

Hardly a masterpiece of writing, it has to be said. In fact the site back then was hardly a masterpiece itself.

It was hosted on a free hosting site that required a login every thirty days or the account was deleted. The domain name was not a '.com' one but a '.uni.cc' redirection one, which I am not even still sure exists. There was no database in the background, everything displayed was a parsed text file with little bits of xml thrown in. All in all it was horrendous and had literally been tossed together with no real purpose to it.

What I thought would be a hobby that last little more than six months has since evolved and become something that I actually enjoy maintaining and keeping alive. The transition from that first rant to the current site took many different variations and steps.

I bought property webspace, which is now home to a few websites as well as The Bauble. The layout and look was changed a number of times before coming to the current version, one which I am really happy with and think wanted all along. The domain name was purchased properly, instead of using a little free redirection one. The pages expanded to included an archive section, a gallery, a video section with my comedy videos. Even a store hawking some wares that I thought people might be interested in. Rants continued to be rants, but now they had tags and topics associated with them. An RSS feed was added. You could comment on entries. Integration with Twitter, even going through the OAuth-pocalypse and making it out the other side.

From extremely humble beginnings with one entry stored on a text file to a site that now emails people with links to new posts The Bauble has turned into something that I never really imagined it becoming myself. A pretty damn good five year old.

Sure there are still things that I could change or do to improve it. Hell I am always tinkering in the background with what would be classed as the 'engine' of the site. Improving it, adding to it, streamlining it. In a way The Bauble will never be finished, but that isn't such a bad thing. Hopefully in another five years I will be posting an entry about how the site is at ten.

Even now I am not entirely sure what the purpose of The Bauble is. Originally it was going to be one of those blogs that consisted of humorous entries complaining about things. Then it moved along and had a few techie entries posted. Some posts about things going on in work made an appearance. I toyed with the idea of re-inventing it as a blog on one topic after I found time to once again sketch and draw, I was going to have it be a pure artist blog. But then my comedy insanity kicked in and it became a place where I chronicled all my gigs. The venting rants still continued, mixed in with all the madness. My hatred for Noel Dempsey became a regular post. I started writing stories again and got back into book writing, figuring that maybe The Bauble could become a writer's site (that pure writing site is still on the way, just time isn't my friend these days).

Eventually I stopped trying to 'make' The Bauble anything and just let it 'be' itself. A place where my insanity could be stored on the Internet for all time for anybody and nobody to read. Which I think it does quiet well. Who really needs a blog to be about one central topic anyway?

So old friend here's to another five years, it's been an interesting and convoluted ride.

Blue_jester

<--end of instaGram Feed-->