belleliu.com

The only thing permanent is change 
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April 18, 2010
 

Switched to Posterous, hello 2010!

This must have been the longest hiatus in my blog, 6 months without an update, but I have good reasons. Highlights of the last few months:

  • Become an aunt on Dec 5, 2009. 
  • Had a fantastic birthday party on Dec 11, 2009.
  • Bought a place in Happy Valley and become a home owner officially on the same day.
  • Renovated the place and moved in just a week later. Still missing Sheung Wan.
  • Had a house-warming party on my rooftop on New Year's Eve.
  • Renovated my office for a month and moved back before Chinese New Year.

While all this was happening, I realized that sharing and publishing on Facebook was so much easier than blogging here, and at times I thought of giving up this blog. But no, actually, I guess I just need a blogging tool that is simpler, something that lets me focus on writing and integrates well with iPhone. A few good friends suggested Posterous, so here I am, running the 4th incarnation of belleliu.com on a hosted service for the first time since 1999:

1999 HTML -> 2003 pMachine -> 2005 WordPress -> 2010 Posterous

So far I'm feeling pretty good about this. Although I haven't been able to migrate the categories, tags and comments from my old WordPress blog (let me know if you figured it out), I guess this is a sacrifice I have to make to change for the better.

I could have tweaked this default template a bit but since my design and HTML/CSS skills are long gone (like my law degree), I better just leave it and blog more.

             

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July 20, 2009
 

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary

Ten years ago, on the 20th of July, 1999, I acquired this domain - belleliu.com. So today marks the 10th anniversary of my little online space! I still remember how excited I was to have my first "personal domain" and how much it cost - US$70 at Network Solutions, the monopoly of domain registrar of that time. Back then, not many people got a personal website, even if they got one, it'd be hosted on third-party services like GeoCities or HK CyberCity / Freenation. Mine was hosted with my ISP - Vision Online. My first website was built in 1997 and the URL was: http://users.vol.net/~belleliu, the ISP even had its own "directory" page listing all personal websites of its users! In 1999, the term "blog" was still not yet a known one but it was exactly what my personal website was like: I treated it like an online diary, posting one piece of little story on a frequent basis, documenting my daily life and archiving by month/year, all done in plain old-school table-based HTML. This is a capture of the WHOIS record showing the start date of this domain:

I wasn't able to find any screen shot of my website circa-1999 (who would keep files for 10 years?), so here's a screen shot of the archived version in 2001:
Here you can view all old versions archived between 2001 and 2008. Recently I am just too lazy to blog. I got a few new gadgets (MacBook Pro 13", New iPhone 3GS and Nike+ ...) and Facebook has gradually replaced as my main communication tool with friends and family, you know sometimes I just don't have THAT much to write about. As a "blogger" of 10 years, I feel quite strongly about the impact of social networks like Facebook (previously Friendster). I should write more about that later. Now it's time to celebrate: by renewing the domain for another 10 years.

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