I have had a website for over ten years now. It began as an archive for the personal email newsletter I started publishing after leaving my job at Roxio – some of the 170,000 subscribers to my Roxio newsletters said they wanted to keep hearing from me, and some of them are still readers and friends!
The site was originally hosted on one of the free hosting services in Italy. I produced it using a simple (but sometimes infuriating) site building software for Windows, whose name I can’t bring to mind right now. Then, as it grew larger and more complex, I learned DreamWeaver to manage it. At some point I started using the straughan.com domain which my friend Markus had bought me as a birthday present. But that was a difficult URL to give out – the spelling is not intuitive – so I cast about for an easier name, and came up with beginningwithi.
The site started out mostly text – I am, first and foremost, a writer – but I’ve also been photographing since childhood. In 2004 I began videoblogging, though in recent years most of my video has been for my work at Sun, Oracle, and now Joyent.
Since starting my new position at Joyent in August, 2011, I’ve been blogging on the SmartOS and Joyeur sites, but have published few substantive articles here, except the one about my father’s death. I did do almost a full month of videos for vlomo11Â in November (missed only one day!).
Year-on-year, views and visitors were down about 5% from 2010, due to the pharma hack which took the site offline repeatedly throughout the summer, until my in-house security expert finally defeated it (and, in the process, learned some things about the vulnerabilities of DreamHost).
The site currently contains over 1,600 posts/pages. I still need to convert the remaining 100 or so pages from my old html site to WordPress. And there’s so much new writing to do, for example about the October trip to India… Onward to 2012!
Full site stats for 2011 (and advertising rates) available here.