May 27th, 2013 marks the 10 year anniversary of the release of WordPress. When WordPress came out it wasn’t long until I heard about it. By the time that 0.72 came out, I was already installing the software on my personal blog.
I had heard about WordPress from Binary Bonsai, better known as Michael Heilemann or the eventual creator of the Kubrick theme. I had been using Blogger, and some PHP scripts by this point, and I had been frustrated with the publishing options available.
When WordPress 0.72 was released in 2003, I was:
- 20 years old
- Running my site on the domain phoenixrealm.com
- finished college at St. Lawrence in Kingston, Ontario Canada
- Just buying my first computer. Up until this point, I was using the family computer or my grandmothers computer
The default WordPress theme that came with WordPress wasn’t the same as it is today. It was a simple, two column theme. I never ended up using this one for very long, despite finding it easy to customize with my limited design skills.
When I first started, I didn’t really have any need for plugins. I was just using it to create pages and blog posts. The first plugins I remember looking for were anti-spam related.
It wasn’t until WordPress 1.5 that things really took off for me with regards to WordPress. In the fall of 2005, I was working at Futureshop, and ended up, through great luck working full time on a blog network.
WordPress as a platform has been largely responsible for my income for over seven years now.
Since I started using WordPress:
- I got married, divorced and engaged to be married again
- Bought, built and sold a house
- Moved nine times in the same province
- Took over 50,000 photos, and uploaded 10% of them to flickr
- Spoke at half a dozen different events about WordPress including two panels at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas
- Written over 50,000 articles on various blogs and websites
- Recorded over 100 WordPress related podcasts on two different shows
- Sold a blog for $xx,xxx and was a major developer of another that was sold for $x,xxx,xxx
- Managed over 400 blogs at the height of my career
- Worked for a blog network as a writer, managed a blog network, developed a premium WordPress theme, and now I’m working for a plugin development shop
- Went from approximately 60GB of storage space to 3500GB of storage space
As for what the world looked like in 2003, I think Dougal Campbell’s post, WordPress 10th Anniversary Blogging Project, has some great points on it.
And for more reading, check out Jeff Chandler’s post on WPTavern, 10 Year Anniversary Project Entry.
If WordPress has touched your life during its ten years in existence, please write your own post using the tag wp10 as well as the hashtag of #wp10 on Twitter so people can find them.
Malcolm's Ramblings 