It’s somewhat difficult believe, but this site – nanikore.net – is 20 years old this month! I’m not going to do some lengthy retrospective, but here’s the short version.
In 2003 blogs were hot, I mean red hot. I’d had the homepage since ~1997 but blogs were the thing, and that’s totally different from a mere homepage, right? There was even a word for this – the blogosphere. That’s like the atmosphere but with a lot more hot air.
In my small corner, I was interested in a system which was easier to update more frequently, and preferably one with a management system which allowed me to post via e-mail because hey, my cell phone could send email, and it had a camera. (So yes, I did post random photos from my phone at resolutions which would make people laugh and cry today). Compare that to my hand coded homepage, updated from a laptop over FTP.
If I remember correctly, my first blog backend for nanikore.net was with Movable Type. ‘MT’ was a big thing at the time, and was broadly free, and indeed it was a very elegant piece of software for the time even though it was mainly written in Perl </joke>, and was very easy to self host, as I did on Pair.com – yes, I’ve been with Pair for a long old time.
There’s actually a side story about that Movable Type to WordPress migration in the early blogging days, which may be of interest to some as it was one of the first major shifts based on licensing.
Anyway, it wasn’t so clear, and I liked this small, open source, system called WordPress, and since I didn’t have much content yet, I moved over. It wasn’t that bad for the era, and rough edges aside, nanikore.net has pretty much been on WordPress ever since, mostly on Pair, with a year or two in the middle on WordPress.com when I just didn’t have much time to write much (yes, even less than now).
The content has evolved for sure. Early on it was random short email posts and tiny photos on life in Japan, and as that became normal, there was more on technology, then snowboarding and motorcycling, and at some point I decided to make nanikore more about outdoor things, and my old homepage more about ‘indoor’, including tech, films and books.
I think I explain the name in the About page – it’s Japanese for ‘what’s this’ and is solidly filed in the ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ folder.
Thanks again to everyone who has ready any of this, and definitely to those who commented or got in touch!
Anyway, to close, here’s a few posts from the last 20 years, of varying levels of quality, but many of which were well hit:
test post to blog – yes, that first test post to see if it was working.
Dog Day Festival – this post has been in my top ten viewed posts for years! No idea why either…
CB400SF – This one makes a bit more sense – my awesome old Honda CB400, which was a terrific bike.
Suzuki Choi Nori – Another bike post – the somewhat bizarre Suzuki Choi Nori
Review: OSMAnd+ – I’d forgotten I did a review of the navigation app I use.
Coast to Coast 2018 – I enjoyed this one – a ride review of our annual coast to coast twistybutt.
and finally, a post I did a few years ago, about a way to add some supernatural protection to your bike.