Today is this weblog's birthday. Well strictly speaking it was yesterday but since October 30 2004 was just a test posting to see if everything was working correctly I consider today the real birthday of this site. On October 31 2004 I wrote that a lot was on my mind and it turned out to stay that way for a whole year. A weblog is a great thing to look back on a year that has passed. Many things have happened and I guess I've accomplished quite a lot. In this post I look back on what has happened since my first test post.

First of all I have become actively engaged in both the blogging community as a whole and the Pivot community in particular. Less than a month after I started this site Pivot Blacklist was born, a much needed spam prevention plugin for Pivot. It started out as a simple commandline script but it quickly evolved into one of the most feature-rich spam prevention suites available for bloggers. When working on it I even came up with some totally new concepts such as Hardened Trackback and Hardened Referrers. Later on I found this technique being used in other software such as Mint which tells me I were onto something with that.

Besides joining the anti-spam movement I developed some other plugins that I'm proud of among which Taggerati is probably the nicest one. Recently I ported it and released a WordPress version as well. The most recent highlight of all my programming efforts is the release of Pivot 1.3b2, the first version of Pivot since I officially joined the team. I've been called a 'blog guru' on quite some weblogs in the Dutch blogosphere and I've even been featured in a book on weblogs as an expert in the field. I guess a lot has happened.

Then there's the content. Content is king, so they say. I've tried to produce articles on this weblog that are actually worth reading. Of course this doesn't always work out but there are quite some articles I've posted over the year that I'm really proud of. I guess it's time to give them some attention in this overview posting.

• PHP5: The Next Generation, an extensive overview of new concepts in PHP5 compared to the previous version
• On a search for the ultimate CMS, an in-depth report on what I think a good Content Management System (CMS) should be like
• The creation of a Flash Clock based on a real design I did in the early nineties. (final result here)
• Reflecting back on running my own online community
• A review of Mint minus the hallelujah
• The article behind this site's title
• wicked Ajax experimentation (part II)
• on RSS and content theft
• Me vs. Jakob Nielsen (still recent but I think it turned out very well)

Of course there's more content that I'm proud of. These are just a bunch that crossed my mind when writing this posting. If you haven't read them yet feel free to do so. I'm always interested in your comments.

Finally there's life itself. Even though I'm not a life blogger, surely a lot has happened in life as well. I've experienced great things and things I'd rather never think of ever again but I'm happy to say it looks like the balance has finally moved towards the positive side of things, for which I'm eternally grateful. I'd like to thank everybody who has been reading this site in the last year. Thank you for your visits, your insightful comments and your emails. It's what makes weblogging worth doing. Thanks a lot. I hope you'll all be joining me for a long time to come.

And last but not least, I'll do something I never thought I'd ever do on a non-private space such as my weblog, but sometimes, something just needs to be said: My dear Renie, I love you! With all my heart. Next year, things can only get better than they already are....