On 13th February 2014, prosody.co.uk celebrated its 10th anniversary. What started as a dark blue site to host my music became a place of experimental blogging, then truly a “collected writings” as it evolved to capture everything I ever wrote at Nintendo Life, and later its sister sites.
Primarily for my own interest, here’s an evolution of prosody.co.uk over the last decade.
OK, so I had the domain from 13th February, but the site didn’t go live until a bit later. The text was a reference to that Grolsch advert, but we changed “beer” to “website”, setting a high standard of linguistic creativity that the site continually fell below.
This very, very blue site had everything a musician nobody had heard of could need: a guestbook, forum, biography, that sort of stuff. I think at one point the forum had around 20 members, so you can tell how big things were getting.
In January 2006 (I forgot exactly when, and Web Archive did too), I started writing at prosody.co.uk/blog. It used Pivot and had a really nice rainy blue theme with a fountain pen, if I recall.
This was the first time I felt excited about writing online.
(Note: this link is actually to November 2006, just because it’s the first archive of this page that looks right)
I changed from Pivot to WordPress in June 2006, and launched the first proper “Collected Writings”. This was the first design I really loved – the top banner changed every month, and I did banners for special occasions, like this one for Tails’ 14th birthday.
This version of the blog was home to a lot of ideas, as I basically did anything I wanted. I wasn’t studying or working full-time, so I had time to write diaries for my Harvest Moon farmer; virtually cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats using an exercise bike, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Wikipedia; do podcasts, and that sort of thing. Truly it was a golden age.
What this site means to me has changed enormously over the years. What started out as a promotional site for my ill-fated musical endeavour turned into a place I could try any idea I wanted. I created a Blog Carnival, podcasted, wrote match reports for Pro Evo 4, and loads more. It helped me develop my writing style and create a portfolio – there are over 1.25 million words here, spread across more than 7,200 published posts – and have a huge amount of fun in the process.
Since moving to Germany for work, I haven’t shown this site any attention. I’d like to change that in 2014.
Happy anniversary, URL. Thanks for everything.
My name is James Newton, and this is my website - a collection of my writings about
videogames, music and all my other thoughts.
