Five Years of the Blog

I just noticed today that it's more or less five years to the day since I started writing this blog. It's been an interesting five years both personally and professionally for me; I gave my first conference presentation more or less five years ago, soon after I started chairing the UKOUG BI & Reporting Tools SIG, I worked for six years or so learning the ropes at a consultancy for whose initial support and encouragement I'll always be grateful, and eventually I went on to spread my wings and start a consultancy of my own along with Jon Mead. Of course, over the same five years the world of Oracle BI & DW has gone through an amazing amount of changes, with Oracle 10g and 11g released, the "Drake" version of Discoverer, the "Paris" release of OWB and of course Oracle then going on to acquire Siebel and Hyperion and adopt their technologies at the future platform for BI in the "Fusion Middleware" world.

Looking back at previous versions of the blog, my first actual website was a hand-coded affair that I put together to host user group presentations, code I'd written and put into the public domain and some general links and articles I'd put together.

I then experimented a bit with blogger.com until I settled down to use Radio Userland, a blogging platform developed by Dave Winer and related to the Manila platform that Oracle used up until recently to host their own blogs.

After running with Radio Userland for a while I switched to Moveable Type, which co-incidentally is the platform Oracle now use for their own staff blogs, possibly because it's possible to host the underlying database on Oracle. An issue I had with Moveable Type at the time was that every time you published new page whole swathes of the site needed to be republished, and the bigger the site got the longer this took, occasionally failing when the hosted server we shared ran out of resources at a key moment. I don't know if this is still how Moveable Type works now, I doubt it though as given the size of sites like blogs.oracle.com this'd hardly be practical now.

This was the initial Moveable Type look...

... which I then updated a year or so later to give it a more "BLAF" look and feel.

Towards the end of 2005 the problems I was facing with Moveable Type were getting a bit too much, partly because of the page republish issue, partly due to licensing changes and partly due to the cumbersome hand-coded templates I was still using, and so towards the start of 2006 I moved the site to Wordpress and CSS on which it still runs today. Around a year and a half ago we switched the domain from rittman.net to rittmanmead.com and over the past year I've been joined on the blog by fellow colleagues Jon Mead, Borkur Steingrimsson and Peter Scott.

So, I hope the site has been useful and entertaining for all of you over the past five years. It's been an interesting and rewarding period for me (even when I nearly lost it all about two years ago) and thanks to everyone who's provided feedback, added comments or who I've otherwise met directly or indirectly through the blog.