Happy Anniversary to Me!

Today marks the tenth anniversary of this website. Well, not really THIS website. I've been keeping this blog for about 2 1/2 years. But it was ten years ago today when I registered the http://www.sweasy.net/ domain.

It was years before Facebook and MySpace, and I was just looking for a way to share photos of my family with far away family members. So for the first eight years sweasy.net was bascially nothing more than an online photo album with just a smidgen of text. I no longer have online pages going back to January of 2000, but the earliest pages I do have (which you can access by clicking this link) give you a general idea of what the website looked like (and if you're really curious, I guess you CAN click the link to see previous pages to go back and see the text of the previous pages; it's just the pictures that are no longer there). And that's pretty much how it stayed until 2008 (though I did occasionally publish a couple of odd things, such as an online version of a book that my older daughter made and a little Flash movie about my younger daughter's sense of fashion).

In May of 2008 I started this blog. Not because I had any interest in keeping a blog, mind you. In fact, for years I'd resisted starting a blog. "Why would I want to share my life with the world?" I'd think. "Why do I think anyone would care?" But then a few years ago blogs-blogs-blogs were all I heard about in education technology (Do YOU have a blog? Are your STUDENTS keeping blogs? What blogs are you FOLLOWING?), so I thought I'd try it out for a while just to see what it's like. Also, I'd just discovered a little site called jottit.com, and I wanted to experiment with how teachers and students could perhaps use it. So I started keeping a blog. After a few weeks, I'd determined that jottit.com COULD work, but I found blogger.com, realized it was easier and I was finished with my blog search.

But blogging wasn't finished with me. By then I was hooked, and I decided to continue with my personal blog. Plus, by then all but a few of my faraway family members had Facebook accounts, and I could share personal photos via Facebook, so I migrated my personal site to Blogger and redirected Sweasy.net to that site (uh, THIS site.) And that's how we got to today.

There's no telling what tomorrow or the next ten years will bring...