Shanku's

So, here goes another try at blogging regularly.

It’s been more than three years since I last wrote a blog entry, and starting up again made me recall the personal sites I’ve created before on the Internet.

I built my first personal website – at least the first one my Internet Service Provider didn’t create for me by default – in 1996. I called it Shanku Planet, a pun on the Douglas Coupland novel. I don’t even have a screenshot today, but looking back, I remember it was way too ambitious. Like everything else in its time, I designed it as a pretty deep tree of content. There was only one problem – I didn’t have time to create so much content. Instead, the site became an excuse to build what was the coolest thing at the time to build, namely, Java applets! Rotating images, marquees, animated menus: if it was interactive and gawdy, I built it. Everyone I showed it to said it was a cool site. I built it. I put it on the Yahoo, Altavista, and various directories – there was no Google then. But no one came. That’s when I learned my first lesson on the Web.

So, I set off to conduct an experiment: if I built something with unique content, who would come? I picked an actress who was obscure at the time (and shall remain nameless), and a few pages and photos later, a fan page was born. I put it up, added a hit counter, and watched the hits pour in. On the guestbook, I got the most amusing posts: people who thought I was the actor; her brother, who was impressed and promised to show it to her; her ex-boyfriend from high school who called himself a loser for splitting up with her; an anonymous college friend who sent me some rather risque pictures, and wanted them back the next day. I updated the site once, and never touched it again, and took it down after about 80K hits, which was quite a large number for those days. But I’d learned my second lesson.

Nearly a decade and a lot of websites later, I launched my first blog for work, as part of the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, in 2004. The blog is still up today. One of my first posts was to announce all the things we were cutting from ASP.NET 2.0 (what we then called “Whidbey”). It was probably the most widely read thing I’ve ever put on the Internet, and got translated into many languages – it is still one of the top hits you get when you search for my name on Google today.

In 2006, I launched my own blog site, using a new simple blog application I had written from scratch on ASP.NET. I launched the code as a new Blog Starter Kit – but I didn’t quite have time to keep it going. And my blog died when I tried to host it from a server out of my house.

So, now in 2010, it’s time for another go at it. A new blog for a new Web. Built with an existing blog engine. Enriched with gratuitous plugins, most of which I will not have to write, and the latest HTML5 features. Linked to Facebook, Live, and Google. Hosted on the cloud. Authored and managed on an iPad.

Stay tuned…