Eli Bendersky's website It has occurred to me that the first post in this blog was 10 years ago, so I decided to dig up a bit of history. 10 years is a long time! As the post linked above shows, I even called it "weblog" then. The term "blog" seems to have been coined in 1999, but probably wasn't popular enough in 2003 yet. That post also closes with a hope that the blog will last; it sure did.
In these 10 years the blog went from an obscure journal on use.perl.org that only a few people knew about to 66,000 unique visitors with half a million page views a month on average (stats for end-of 2012).
While it looks very different from the initial "weblog", it actually went through relatively few incarnations for its age. Starting somewhere in 2005 I became unhappy with use.perl.org and eventually moved the blog to Blogger. But Blogger itself was quite limited for serious programming-related blogging at the time, so it took me only two weeks to figure out it's not quite what I wanted and move to a Wordpress-based blog on my own domain and shared hosting (Bluehost). In the seven years that has passed since, the blog changed very little visually. I stretched the main viewing area bit by bit as high-resolution monitors became more common, installed a couple of minor plugins, but that's it.
What did change was the quality of content. As I wrote here, the blog became much more technical with time, leaving the shorter and more personal posts to outlets like G+. The amount of technical content is also the reason the blog's popularity grew rapidly in the past few years. Apparently more people want to know how debuggers work and about the internals of Python and Linux loaders than about some random cool library I found or how I spent the last week at work being bored. Go figure.
So what's next?
Dedicated readers will notice that the number of in-depth posts has slowed down in the past few months. This was to be expected, having moved to a different continent and started a much more demanding job. But I still hope to continue posting articles from time to time. This blog is far from being done! As for infrastructure, I was actually pondering to make a large change after yet another break-your-site Wordpress upgrade. But I still haven't found time to do this. Maybe at some point I will.
So thanks for reading, and wishing myself at least another 10 years of blogging. It has been an incredibly positive experience for me in many respects, and I have full intention of keeping it up as long as I can.