Doug Bowman & first posts

A few years back Doug Bowman’s StopDesign.com was one of the first blogs that I subscribed to (once I figured out what RSS was!) Having a chance to meet and spend some time with Doug when he was in Wellington for Webstock was definitely one of the highlights of last year for me.

So, it’s great to see him vowing to write more frequently again. He points at his very first post from 2002. A lot of what he wrote then resonates with me, having just started out on this myself.

This log of thoughts is mostly for my own record, but if you’re along for the ride, welcome.

Inspired by this, I decided to try and track down other first posts from some other favourite long-time bloggers. Here are some links, in chronological order:

• Jeffrey Zeldman, May 1995 - unfortunately the post is no longer available on zeldman.com, but I did find this email about his first post
• Joel Spolsky from Joel On Software, December 1999
• Seth Godin, January 2002
• Russell Brown, September 2002 - this post marked the end of the Hard News radio show and the start of the blog as far as I can tell
• Rod Drury, June 2003 - I’m not sure if this was actually his first post, it seems a strange way to start, but this is as far back as his archives go in any case
• Hugh MacLeod from Gaping Void, January 2004
• Mark Cuban, March 2004
• Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen, January 2005

It’s interesting how many of these posts are from December/January - obviously a popular time of year to be making a start.