Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

The official 10th anniversary of the release of WordPress is May 27, 2013. It has been an amazing 10 years, during which WordPress evolved from a simple blogware to a very full-featured CMS (Content Management System), used to power some of the biggest and most popular web sites on the internet. All over the world, people are planning celebrations. As much as I like a good party, I thought this would also be a good time to celebrate WordPress by actually using WordPress — for blogging.

So much of our content sharing these days tends to be via centralized “social” platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, etc., that some of us neglect our blogs. I know I’m guilty of that. But this anniversary is a good excuse for the WordPress community to take a few minutes to consider their time with our favorite website building tool. Here’s what I propose…

Think about the past 10 years, and your time with WordPress. Maybe, like myself, you’ve been using WordPress since the beginning, or perhaps you just tried it out for the first time last month. But consider the events that stand out in your memory during that time. Now, write a blog post about it. Wherever you fall on the timeline, you should probably be able to write something about one or more of the following openings:

• “When WordPress was first released in 2003..”
• “When I first started using WordPress…”
• “Since I first started using WordPress…”

So, for example, I’ve been using WordPress pretty much since the beginning. I didn’t actually switch my blog until September 2003, but I’d been committing to core before that, so I might list things like,

When WordPress was released in May 2003:

• I was 36 years old
• I had been married for less than 2 years
• I already had nearly 10 years of web development experience
• My Pentium 4 laptop with 1GB of RAM was a screaming machine

When I first started using WordPress in September 2003…

• The Ellen Degeneres show had just debuted on TV
• The US Treasury redesigned the $20 bill
• George W. Bush was in his first term as President
• SCO and IBM were locked in a legal battle over ownership of Linux source code
• My day-job was doing web development in VBScript and PerlScript on IIS4 servers
• Many people didn’t have cell phones, and the iPhone was still 4 years away
• Mozilla replaced Netscape
• The term ‘AJAX’ (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) didn’t exist yet
• The Ubuntu distribution of Linux didn’t exist yet
• PHP5 was brand spanking new
• Facebook was only a few months old, and I hadn’t even heard of it yet
• Geocities was still a big thing

Since I started using WordPress…

• There have been 2 Summer Olympics and 2 Winter Olympics
• I moved from southeast Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia
• I became a homeowner
• I have changed jobs at least 8 times, if you include short-term contracts
• I have had another daughter, who is now in 2nd grade
• Apple switched from Motorola PowerPC to Intel processors
• My family adopted a dog and two cats
• There have been 5 iterations of the iPhone and 3 of the iPad
• Myspace went from top-of-the-heap to also-ran to come-back-kid

There could be all sorts of life, historical, or technological events listed, but anyhow, you get the idea.

It’s nothing complicated, but I just thought this would be a really fun thing to give a lot of people something common to write about, and actually use our WordPress sites for publishing content. I suggest we use the tag wp10 for all the posts (hashtag #wp10 for Twitter and such). Also, in addition to writing your own post, make sure to seek out posts by others, and link to your favorites!