5th Blogoversary

We've been running this blog for exactly five years today at 3:11pm, see us at Blogoversary. When we started blogging we were aiming specifically at family and friends but beyond that we can't really remember what we were hoping for the blog or what it would end up looking like, but five years on we're quite pleased with what the blog has achieved and how it looks today.

Our first post was entitled: Welcome To Our Blog and back then we were getting ready for our imminent departure from Blighty. We arrived in South Africa on the 16th July '04 when Joel was a mere 16 months old and Eli was a very distant dream.

Blogging has changed since we started as more people are doing it and many many more people actually read blogs on a regular basis. We've grown more comfortable with the material we blog about and have come to understand the limitations of blogging. Privacy is a continual concern and we try to protect ourselves whilst allowing family and friends to keep up to date with what's going on in our lives. When we started Dean didn't have a clue about editing the code behind the blog, today through much trial and error but mostly error, he's quite adept at editing HTML and CSS code which is how he's edited the template into a distinctive and unique format.

When we started the blog for family and friends we hadn't considered the fact that it would be available to anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection. As a result we now have regular readers in Argentina, USA, Russia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Africa. Recently we even had a visitor from Iran which really excited Dean. We're able to track where visitors come from, how long they stayed and their IP address which is amazing. We can also see how visitors arrived via any of the internet search engines and what internet browser they are using.

The future of blogging will be interesting. For years we've been telling people about our blog often with little success and yet many of our friends will use Facebook and we think services such as Facebook and Twitter are probably the future, certainly they seem to be more popular. Consequently we can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.