A decade of One Man & His Blog

Ten years ago today, the alarmingly brown-haired chap above put finger to keyboard and wrote the words

“And so it begins…”

And so it did – One Man & His Blog came into being. At first it lived on Blogger and at the URL http://adam.tinworth.name (.name never really took off, did it?) and now it lives on Movable Type and http://www.onemananandhisblog.com. This time next year, it’ll probably be on WordPress, but all will otherwise be the same. It’ll be here – if I am – and I’ll be blogging away merrily.

(I have to say, looking at that picture above, I’ve aged…)

This site has been in continuous publication for a decade. I’m slightly staggered that it has survived – and thrived – over that time. This has been the backdrop to nearly a quarter of my life, through my marriage, my mother’s death, my redundancy and the arrival of my beautiful baby daughter. So many other blogs have come and gone in that time. Those of us with the stamina to stay put and keep on going seem to be a vanishingly small bunch. A signifiant proprtion of the links in those early posts are now dead, the sites they pointed to long gone from the net. Indeed, the first link in that very first post is dead.

This blog represents the largest continuous body of work I’ve ever done, and I’m immensely proud of it with all its mistakes, wrong turns and failed experiments. There’s been some great writing, some great conversations, some fun photography, more links than I’d care to count, and the odd great argument along they way. It’s got my name into national papers, lead to speaking gigs, and been behind every piece of work I’ve done for the best part of seven years.

I did my “decade of blogging” post 18 months ago – there was a blog that preceded that one – but I didn’t want this anniversary to pass unremarked.

And I’m not going to mark it with a long self-indulgent post – just a short(ish) one. 🙂 I am going to make it with a series of changes to the way I run this blog, and the posts you’ll see coming through fairly quickly. In preparation for the anniversary, I’ve been looking through my own archives, looking for things I can learn from; ideas that drifted away that can be brought back, elements of the blog I never explored to my satisfaction. Over that decade, my blog has actually moved to the centre of my working life. Without this here database of content, none of the work I’ve been doing over the last year or so would have materialised. Now that I’ve had a couple of months where I earned more than I did in my corporate job, but for working fewer hours (Fridays are devoted to childcare for my daughter), I have a lot to be grateful for, and to the work I put in here particualrly. But the blog got a little neglected in recent months. I was too busy working or being a family man to give it the attention it deserved.

It’s time to repay that with some investment back into this site. So changes are coming – indeed, they started yesterday and will continue through the next few months.

Thank you for coming with me this far, and I hope you’ll join me on the journey to come. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun.

As I said a decade ago:

I’ll be your host on this particular Blog until I run out of things to discuss or you run out of patience for my words.

Luckily, neither of those things has happened just yet…