This was where it all began: this pile of six battered journals, each of them approximately A4 size or larger, filled over the course of some two and a half years. I’d been introduced to online journalling way back in 1997, but I entered the army soon after and only got 56k access to the internet once a week. So I wrote in these ledgers, day after day, and once in a while on weekends I’d show what I’d written to friends. That was my first experience with the concept of a shared journal.

Around mid-2000 I left the military, and soon I’d set up an online journal of my own called Firestarter. I did all the HTML work myself, and after 2001 — when I bought my first digital camera — I was responsible for every picture, every word, every line of HTML (and later, every line of CSS).

These images show one of the site’s incarnations, from 2001-2003: the navigation system basically involved moving the vertical framebar left and right to reveal navigation options, creating a nice sliding-panel effect. (Another incarnation — and selected entries from those early days — can be found here.) By 2005, however, blogging software had become so advanced and complex that hand-coding seemed a little ridiculous by comparison. So I moved to WordPress and started this blog, now called rainy blue dawn. And though it’s 2010 and topical, article-based blogging is now widely seen as the way of the future, rainy blue dawn remains a resolutely personal blog. I hope you’ll stick around and share a little of what this life has to offer, just as you’ve done these last ten years. Peace, and keep on reading.

Rainy blue dawn does have a sister blog, called Differently Dreaming: a site about work, creativity, and human fulfilment. Head on over if you’ve got the time.

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