In July 2000, I started a blog. I used the less-than-a-year-old service called Blogger, three years before Google would buy it. They had a nifty FTP service which meant I could host the site on my own domain and servers, but use their clever (as it seemed at the time) back-end blog-creation code.

courtesy of the Wayback Machine

I was able to add other contributors and was aided at first by McBain, then by Spadge and eventually Scott joined in. A small team of bloggers ensured we were able to put out rather a lot of little posts, much in the way a site like Daring Fireball does today. In fact, I’m rather amused at how my original design looks like linked-list blogs do to this day. Of course, as my tech skills grew, I was able to download all my old posts and put them into a MySQL database and replicate the basics of Blogger in some hand-churned PHP. I was one of the first sites to use Tamsin’s amazing WeatherPixie service and was lucky enough to get my own custom Trooper featuring my very own cat, the late Tony the Snotcat. In May, 2003, I was able to try my hand at Standards-compliant CSS and ditch Blogger for good.

Again, Wayback goodness

There was a design between those two designs, but Wayback appears to not have cached the images. You can see it here, but without the little drop-shadows, it’s not what it should be. In 2004, while being hosted at Ourshack, a collective with a rack-mounted BSD box, it underwent its final redesign. Embarrassingly, almost six years on, this design is still in use today, albeit not for long. I did eventually get round to making a logo, luckily.

I've still not updated the design since January, 2004.

After that, it was hosted at Sharedserver, before moving to my own server at Cat5. At the height of its activity and popularity, 23x.net had a Page Rank of 5, which was quite impressive at the time. Whether or not this blog, the continuation of what was started in 2000, will ever reach that height remains to be seen. The old site, running on its home-grown code, is being retired shortly. I’ve removed the login block and have posted the last post. All old posts will of course still work and will soon be displayed with a microblog-style single post page without any surrounding crap. Something like this, probably.

23x.net posts as they will be displayed shortly.

Running a blog for almost a decade taught me a lot about how websites work and made me a better Sysadmin. I learned what proper HTML and CSS were and about optimising PHP (or sites in general) for performance. I learned the basics of SEO, which to be honest haven’t changed that much in the last few years, in spite of what snake oil salesmen will tell you. I also learned how much community is on the internet. Twitter was the death knell for 23x as it was, but for a site that remained web 1.0 defiantly for almost a decade, I think it did ok.

The last post

You can follow the contributors on their Twitter accounts here: Scott, Spadge and Jared (that’s me). I will continue blogging here, on this very blog, and over on Monsterbook, but the old blog has coughed its last post.

1. Start a stupid top ten list.
2. Put the good hints up front.
3. Make the last item of the list a good one.
4. Split the list before you get to the filler.
5. Pack it full of filler.
6. Refer to another item on the list as this adds filler, like number 5 above.
7. Split the list over several pages as each page counts as a view for your adverts.
8. Drag it out to ten items, because it seems like the right amount.
9. Use promising filler before a useful last item.
10. Mention how cool/stupid Twitter is as comment-bait. If you don’t know what Twitter is, mention Apple vs PC and take an indefensible side.

Then, write a paragraph to say some bullshit that has a few SEO terms, like SEO or MLM and watch the link farms link back for the trackbacks and backlinks as the circle-jerk inflates itself by one. Oh, and solicit comments by begging and then tweet the list without using a URL shortener. Comments?

Update: 2009-04-17

1. Come back later and add an 11th point.

As you may have seen, John Gruber over on Daring Fireball referred to Yankee Stadium as “the most celebrated sporting venue in the world”. Immediately, I thought this was not the case and decided to correct him, informing him the most celebrated sporting venue in the world was in fact … oh, um what is it again?

Photo of Yankee Stadium by Silent Wind of Doom, Wikipedia.

Needless to say, outside the US, there aren’t many, apart from maybe a few Japanese, that would choose Yankee Stadium.

Am I wrong? What are your suggestions for the most celebrated sporting venue in the world? Comments below, please.