March 8th, 2006
Announcements
#999
Four years ago…
…I started this blog. Well, not really: it was an ordinary personal website, intended to host well-researched essays and helpful tutorials on the Vietnamese language. The only thing is, it also had this “blog-in-kind” on the front page that announced any additions to the website. Over time, it morphed and grew into a full-fledged blog, and eventually the website became little more than the blog you see here. All I can say is that it really started with an article about sesquipedalia (in its original form).
I blame Movable Type, the software that has powered this blog from its humble beginnings as an announcements section. It made things so much easier than the tedious process I had suffered through previously: code a page in HTML, connect to the FTP server, find the right folder, upload the page, and repeat for every page that should happen to harbor a Related Links section.
Movable Type’s Save button made that entirely unnecessary, and it fueled alternating flurries of posts and lulls in activity that probably annoyed my regular readers equally. Though at least it allowed me to claim to my competitors – not entirely falsely – that this site was “Updated daily.” That was some claim to make in the days before LiveJournal’s entrance into mainstream culture (and later Xanga’s and MySpace’s).
I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about how far my blog has gone and what herdles I’ve had to overcome in keeping it going – I’ll save that for this time next year, my fifth blogiversary. (You knew that was a word, didn’t you?) For now, I’ll just serve up a few links from the (read: my) past:
- The first incarnation of the first website I ever kept online for any prolonged period of time, The Loveland Schools Press ONLINE. Notice the tasteless cacophony of animation. After all, we were still in the late ’90s.
- A mirror of the second incarnation of LSP Online. After more than a year of neglect, I later replaced the main site with a “letter from the editor,” declaring quite eloquently the site’s closure – as if that were necessary.
- Archives from the original Minh’s Notes, before it took on a function more or less independent from MingerWeb, my long-defunct personal site.
- A replica of the design that this blog wore from 2002 to 2003, refurbished with the latest entries.
- The last blog entries ever to be published at my Netfirms site, which I maintained until I moved Minh’s Notes to my brand-new f2o account here.
- Another replica of an old design here, the appropriately-elegant Notebook design that adorned this blog for most of 2004 and 2005, after over a year in production. Someday, I might give in and revert to this beautiful design for old-times’s sake.
- …
And here we are. 2006. The day before my birthday, this site stands at 714 published entries, 428 approved comments, and 329 approved TrackBack pings, including those from one translation (Apuntes de Minh in Spanish), as well as a somewhat-popular feed aggregator for 357 blogs by 236 St. Xers. And lots more stuff that I planned but never got around to carrying out.
So that’s my state of the site address for tonight. I hope you’ve been bored utterly stiff.
3/ 9/2006 @ 9:01 PM
Minh’s Notes
Nineteen years
Updated:
AGE: Nineteen years.
STATUS: Showered.
7/21/2007 @ 9:32 PM
Minh’s Notes
When I was five
…I could recite the alphabet, write with both hands, speak a smattering of Vietnamese, sing church hymns, and build rather
primitivepostmodern structures with Legos. Minh&rsquo...