Ten years in the Blogosphere

My blog will be 10 years old tomorrow and this is my 5,297th blogpost.

That works out to an average of 530 posts a year, so I can’t be accused of neglecting it.

I put a counter on it in May, 2006 and since then there have been more than 325,500 page views. I don’t know if that’s impressive or not, but there it is.

I enjoy blogging from the road, especially on long motorcycle trips.

So, in August, 2004, I bought a used Treo 300 cell phone on Ebay. You couldn’t call it a smartphone, not at least by today’s standards. It was just a tricked-out PDA (personal digital assistant) that could access the internet.

I upgraded a year later to a Treo 600 which had a rudimentary camera.

Soon after, I bought a fold-out keyboard to use with the 600, so I wouldn’t have to type with my thumbs, which can be tedious for long passages of text.

It worked OK, but it was just another thing to carry around and was a bit of a hassle to set up.

Then, in October, 2006, I moved up again, this time to the Treo 700. It had a better camera, but I was back to typing with my thumbs.

What I had always really wanted was a small laptop computer that could fit easily into my motorcycle saddlebags and withstand the bumps and jolts of motorcycle travel.

The breakthrough came in March, 2009, when I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook.

It came with a solid-state hard drive – no moving parts to get beaten up. Free Wifi was still a little scarce in those days, so I added a Sprint AirCard and bit the bullet on the $60 monthly connection fee.

Within a couple of years, however, free Wifi had become more prolific – McDonald’s, Panera, Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, etc. – so I sold the AirCard on Ebay and since then have relied on my ability to find Wifi when I want it.

The Mini 9 is soldiering along in its sixth year. I’ve replaced the SSD hard drive three or four times, but I’ve been smart enough to protect my data by putting everything I create onto an SD card that serves as a D drive for the netbook.

I don’t think anyone makes netbooks anymore. They were a very big deal in 2009, but the market has shifted to tablets. I like a real keyboard, so I’ll stick to my netbook as long as I can.

It will be interesting to see what technology I’m using in another 10 years.