I recently updated the articles list, and added a counter to the link at the bottom. Which, as I draft this post, shows a count of 99.

So this is the 100th post on this site. Big news!

Except of course it’s not. Not really. Not all my writing is on this site. I still have a bunch of “imported” articles sitting in the wings, retrieved from older versions of this site, some dating back longer than I care to admit. Many more are more dated than old, if you know what I mean.

I read recently that if you’re not embarrassed by your old work, you haven’t really grown, which in many ways means I must have grown quite a lot in the last couple of decades. I mentioned on my updated about page that I have been writing online since the last century, and it’s true. My first website was published back in 1998, on some free space that came along with my first dial up connection from Freeserve. I can’t even remember how I put it together, likely on some bootleg copy of Dreamweaver, which would have been brand new software at the time.

That original site was named after the first four letters of our family car’s registration plate - about the only thing that came to mind when we were asked for a username and found out that Barrett had already been taken. Turns out there’s still some remnants of it on the Wayback Machine, albeit from a couple of years later.

Having had a quick revisit of that site, some of it is definitely, toe-curlingly cringe (as I believe the kids call it). Some of it is familiar, though: Links to my first few commercial web projects (sites for local bed and breakfasts, and one for a local hip hop label), some essays that I had written, and a page of “rantings” that was clearly a blog before that term had been invented.

Halting, blustering, simultaneously full of my own importance and crushingly shy. Some things change, some things remain the same.

And so here I am, still bashing keys and making marks on a screen, hoping someone is reading and taking some sort of enjoyment from all this. Even if it turns out to just be me, some twenty plus years later.