I was just checking out some of my very oldest posts here on NotSL and realised that a very important milestone for NotSL passed on 10 January 2011: it was NOtSL’s 10th birthday!

Crikey, that means I’ve been blogging in some shape or form for 10 years.

I’m trying to remember what it was like 10 years ago. I was using a CGI script to post updates on my then website, so it wasn’t officially NotSL then; just a small sideline to a personal website highlighting some of my interests at the time: Celine Dion and Kate Winslet among them.

I don’t rightly remember when NotSL first came into existence, although I suspect it was when I was living in a flat in Muswell Hill (A, do you remember?) in 2003-2004. I will check out the Web Archive to see.

When I first started posting, I was just 20 years old and in the middle of my final year of my BA History degree at Swansea. Little did I know where I would be in 10 years time: married with a little boy, a qualified solicitor and a senior manager at a Deaf organisation.

Here’s to the next 10 years!

You will probably notice that I’ve had a bit of a “blogging frenzy” this last week. I posted rather intermittently in 2009, and hardly at all this year – only 8 posts up to last week – and now find myself enjoying posting one again, and following my Stress post, realised how therapeutic it could be.

I was then quite happy to read this article, and it made me realise something.

The reason I’ve hardly posted during the last two years is probably because of my growing utilisation of Twitter and Facebook, where it is far more convenient and less bothersome to say something: short rather than long. But now I see the difference. Cory Doctorow says:

Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else.

That’s interesting. I never really thought of it like that; that I’d abandoned blogging because the bulk of what I would previously post about was actually more suitable for Twitter, and as I’ve said, it’s much quicker to do it on Twitter, as you’re only limited to 140 characters each time.

But then I started to feel that I wasn’t quite able to get things off my chest as much as I’d like. After all, on Twitter you can go “ARGH! HATE [PICK A THING OR SOMEONE]” on Twitter, but you don’t really get the opportunity to elaborate and really say what you want to say.

With blogging, you can. And so here I am!

And no, I don’t think blogging is dying. Perhaps the blogs I used to read regularly have stopped posting – Grumpy Old Deafies and Saltbar are good examples – but there’s probably two reasons for that: (1) they can’t be bothered any more; or (2) they’re tweeting instead. But who’s to say that they won’t start up again? In fact, I URGE them to!

I’ve finally got back into the habit of checking out my Bloglines account regularly courtesy of my new iPhone, which makes it so easy (check out http://i.bloglines.com

I’ve been catching up on some blogs and there are some pretty good ones out there. If you have any suggestions as to what I should be checking out, let me know.