One of the oldest blogs on the internet – since 1998!
This blog started out as one of the early “personal homepages” in the young days of the internet.
It has been around since 1998 when my professor Espen Andersen at BI Norwegian Business School encouraged his students to publish their assignments online.
I first set up a free home page on Xoom; then, it struck me how cool it would be to have my own .com domain. When I found that bauck.com was available for $10, I didn’t have to think twice. Voilà!
Since I had the domain, it made sense to use it for more than just publishing an assignment. Inspired by links.net and a few other, even older classics, I coded some pages in HTML using Windows Notepad. Those pages included a short story of my life, my CV, and a handful of pictures. It basically followed the same recipe as the handful of other “personal home pages” by tech-savvy people in the late 1990s.
When I discovered the joys of photography around 2003, I started uploading some of my pictures to the site. By then, I had moved to Kenya for what was supposed to be a one-year internship (newsflash: I’m still there! 😂), and I rarely missed an opportunity to travel to new places in Africa. Back then, pictures online of most places on this marvelous continent were scarce, and my website was among the few with a sizable collection of travel pictures from African countries. When I discovered a thing called Google Analytics, I was shocked to see that my site actually attracted some 2,000 unique visitors monthly.
I had even made the effort to write a few words about some of the places I had visited, and this suddenly placed me among the top Google hits for a lot of places in Kenya, Ethiopia, and on Zanzibar. At one point, my site would even come up as number 6 when you googled “Nairobi“.
The concept of blogging was in its infancy at this time, and I was still using static pages, requiring quite some effort for every addition. Hence, the site remained limited to a photo gallery and a handful of travel stories.
In 2009, I finally started using WordPress, and the pages from my old website entered the era of modern blogging.
I’ve been an on-and-off blogger ever since, but my blog has kept growing over the years, and according to Google Analytics, it still attracts a sizable audience!
My About Me page, the core of any classic 1990s “personal home page”, was the original centerpiece of my blog. It has evolved quite a lot since then, along with my life and this website. The style, content, and humour may be a bit less crude than when I was in my early 20s! 😄