A brief history of this blog

The reboot late last year gives the impression that this blog is a brand new creation. That couldn't be further from the truth. It's been close to two decades since I registered the domain "lars-christian.com", set up WordPress for the first time and began my journey as a blogger.

Unfortunately, I didn't do much to preserve the history of the blog. But, thanks to the magnificent Internet Archive (donate if you can) I can reconstruct much of what I published in the years that followed. I

My goal with this work is to preserve as much of this blog— and, by extension, my — history on this current edition of the site. If you experience some RSS or social feed hiccups, like a review of the event where Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone, I apologise in advance.

Hopefully, most people won't even notice. But, as I'm bringing back the past, I also wanted to write this post and share a short recollection of this blog with current readers.

The beginning

I registered this domain in early April 2005. Back then, I ran a website called Zelda Universe. Zelda Universe started as a section on my very first personal website, circa 1999-2000. No domains back then, just a directory provided by my ISP on the server home.no.net.

That particular section, which was about the Nintendo 64 games Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask in particular, gots lots of visitors. We're talking tens of people every day. It was enough to make me decide I should make a website dedicated entirely to Zelda stuff. 

To cut a long story short, Zelda Universe became a popular fansite in the years that followed. By 2005, it got between 10.000 - 15.000 visitors per day, and running it was my full time job. Not a lucrative one, but full time, and then some, nevertheless.

By early 2005, I was contemplating moving on to other ventures. The first step in doing so was setting up a personal website. And thus, Lars-Christian.com was born. I installed WordPress 1.5 and published the very first post on 12 April 2005. Here it is:

Welcome to the BEST blog in the world!

Okay, maybe not. But if you stay tuned and have an interest in the same things as me, which includes web development, movies, music, football, tv shows and much more, I promise that you’ll find something interesting to read about here eventually. 

Now I just have to get this thing to look good, and I’ll start writing :)

Not exactly the literary masterpiece for which I've since become known. Ahem… Starting out, the blog was a deeply personal venture. A place where friends could read what I was up to. After a couple of months, I stopped updating the blog. And by the time I next posted, I decided it was time for a reboot.

Resurrection #1: Tech blog

I didn’t feel like running any websites anymore, that is. This was because I had other, more importants things in my life to focus on. But now due to a series of coincidents, my almighty weblog has been ressurected and brought back online. Actually there was only one incident involving a broken collarbone which put me out of the game called life for about four weeks, and since I have nothing better to spend those for weeks on other than the computer, I thought it would be a good time to bring back my blog.

I said, in February 2006. With this reboot, came a slight change of concept. Instead of writing only about "what's going on (with me)" I also began writing about other things. Things like The Long Tail, Online Anonymity and Web 2.0. Before long, I started fashioning myself a tech blogger.

So much, in fact, that I felt the need to reboot the blog yet again in late 2006. In December I launched a new design (still like it) and simultaneously, as a commitment to my new calling, I started from a blank page and deleted all old posts.

I now wrote about Macworld keynotes (Steve Jobs' biggest fanboy) and the cool, new social platforms of the day like Digg, VIRB, StumbleUpon and Facebook (one of these is not like the others). Guides like How to: Move your blog to a new host and 40 Excellent Resources for Publishers show what I was thinking about in those days.

Eventually, my enthusiasm for tech blogging fizzled. As social silos ate my life, my post frequency decreased. My interest in tech, however, did not dwindle.

Resurrection #2: Lifestream

In 2008, the "Lifestream" concept was all the rage. The idea was to make your blog the central hub for all your online activity. I wrote:

I recently finally found the tools I needed to turn this blog into what I always wanted to be; A presentation of my online persona, and an aggregated display of my various acitivities throughout the internet. All the information you see there is pulled from my profiles on sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Pownce and Silent Sound Waves, my music blog. Mixed in with all of that you will also find posts I write here at Lars-Christian.com, because underneath this is still a regular old blog where I write about anything and everything that catches my attention.

Not unlike the PESOS principle in today's IndieWeb vernacular. On my front page you'd be greeted with my latest tweets, image uploads to Flickr, StumbleUpon activity, votes on Digg and the like.

Unfortunately Internet Archive did not archive the stylesheets from this edition of the site.

As a result of this appearance of activity, the frequency of regular blog posts ground to a halt. The posts I did write were mostly personal in nature. Additionally, as I allude to in the above quote, I had started a separate music blog. It didn't last very long.

Resurrection #3: Travelling blog

Early 2010 I went to the United States for a few months. I revamped my blog in preparation:

The idea was to keep people back home updated on how I was doing. It didn't quite play out that way. Turns out, between school and a full time internship I revamped a startup's website, I was quite busy and had little time to write blog posts. I ended up publishing exactly no posts during my months in the States.

Nor the rest of the year, for that matter. In many ways, it marked the end of an era. Because it would take more than a decade before I decided to revive my blog again. Writing in English, that is. Because there was, of course, another resurrection.

Resurrection #4: Norwegian

February 2011 I relaunched my blog yet again. The big difference this time around was that the posts were now in my native language, Norwegian. I was nearing the end of my studies. It was time to find my first "real" job, and I thought that restarting my blog and writing in Norwegian would help me impress potential employers.

Motivation fizzled as the enthusiasm of a reboot faded. I posted sporadically, before a slight uptick in activity again in early 2014. This became another short lived affair, and by late 2014 I had written my last Norwegian blog post. By 2017 I had turned the front page into a profile page, and relegated my posts to an archive link.

The site remained a frozen capsule in time for the next few years. That is, until I decided to pursue a career change back in 2020. Since my goal was to work with website development and management, I thought it was time to brush the dust off of this thing. That didn't mean another blog reboot, as such. I just redid the look, and updated my profile text to what was essentially the first version of my current /about page.

It would take another three years until I started posting regularly again, in late December 2023.

And there you have it. A brief recap of the nearly two decades of fits and starts of blogging. Let’s see how long I keep it going this time around.

Either way, I hope you're all ready for a big twenty year anniversary celebration in a year's time!