Reorganising this blog

I started blogging in July 2005, using the wrong software and posting to my .Mac account. By the following February, I was using WordPress but posting in French. A sort of blogging golden age, that lasted from 2006 to 2008, followed, coinciding with a period when I worked rather hard and also went out quite a lot. Hence the opera reviews. In the summer of 2008, after a spending time in South Africa and hardly blogging at all, I switched to blogging in English: about six out of ten visitors are English-speaking, the remainder being mainly French, so I’m quite pleased I made that decision. In 2009, I decided to use my own name, in keep with the general trend towards greater Net openness, and stopped using any pseudonyms.

The time has now come to draw this process to its logical conclusion and consolidate all the posts written in all the above guises in one language and one site. The language, of course, had to be English and the site had to be donaldjenkins.com. I did toy for a while with the idea of running a bilingual blog. But the SEO implications of this were unclear and I thought it might be overkill. So I translated all the old blog posts¹, which hadn’t been available online for nearly two years, and uploaded them, for the first time, to this site. They have occasionally been made more concise, and comments (which were in French anyway) haven’t been preserved. You can browse through them by visiting the archives². The translations, which I did in a bit of a hurry, are clearly perfectible, so I hope readers will be indulgent.

I’m struck by how much my writing style and the topics covered have changed. I don’t really go to the Paris opera at all any more, so the supply of reviews effectively dried up. I’m considerably more interested in tech and probably post more about politics than I used to. Eclecticism doesn’t really help keeping readers, but this site is meant to be, above all, a reflection of whatever I’m interested in at any given time. Don’t expect the site to become less eclectic any time soon. But if you want to keep track of things, one easy way of focusing on what interests you most is subscribing to Tech posts or Non-Tech posts only.

I hope anyone who missed my old posts will be pleased to see them back online.