I’ve just realised that today marks 5 years since the very first post on this blog. I’m not sure how 5 years came around, the blog began because I was just leaving a job and every time I did that, I lost my directory of useful scripts that I collected. I also didn’t know how to use grep 5 years ago (or linux, or vim …) and so I couldn’t find things in the directory anyway. So I started to blog things, in the hope of finding them again when I wanted them.

This approach has worked so well that I now joke about using my blog instead of a brain. If I solved a problem, or implemented a tool, then the evidence is usually here. The best thing about my blog posts is that they are written very clearly, in short words that I can understand. Even better, the paths are always right for my system, how handy!

There have also been some hilarious moments along the way. Googling for a problem to find my own blog post in the results, and, yes, it had exactly what I was looking for and I had no recollection of having had the problem. This happens fairly regularly now and my record for the shortest time between blogging something and then forgetting I have done that and looking it up is 3 weeks (if you don’t know me personally, yes I’m *that* ditsy! If you do, then you knew that already). I surpassed myself on the occasion that I wrote the same blog post twice (I of course cannot now remember what that was about so I can’t find those posts, but they do exist)

So, tonight I’m having a browse of the archive and looking at how far I’ve come in terms of writing (after 623 posts, you would sort of hope so!) and at how my approaches and interests have changed. At one time I wrote about the houses we tried to buy, and then the house we bought; today we have a major building work project underway but the evidence is confined to flickr. When I started this blog, I was not a PHP developer, I was an unemployed Delphi developer who did PHP as a hobby! Now I run my PHP consultancy from the same pink-with-pink-writing website that I started 5 years ago, in between speaking and writing in a variety of places.

All in all, it’s been a journey, and all I can say is …. here’s to the next 5 years!