5 Years of Blogging
On the 28th June 2012, I wrote my first post for this blog. Since then, this blog has gone through many forms and different types of content but the past 8 months, I have been committed to posting every single Friday.
I thought about how I could mark such an occasion. One thing that is done on anniversaries is to look back and give facts like what the price of milk at that time was or something. Now 5 years is clearly not long enough to do that, but in the world of technology, it is.
So I thought it would be fun to look back and see what versions things were 5 years ago.
Software
PHP - PHP 5.3.14 and PHP 5.4.4 were the very latest version. Now, the latest version is 7.1 (with 7.2 now in alpha release).
Apache - Apache 2.4 was only a couple of months old.
MySQL - MySQL was on 5.5 (now 5.7).
Symfony Framework - latest version was still 2.0 and 2.1 came out in September (now 3.4 with 4.0 on the way).
WordPress - Version 3.4.1 was released the day before (this is probably the version that this blog was originally built on). Now, over 100 releases later (I stopped counting at this point but probably closer to 150), it is on 4.8.
Ghost - Was barely an idea. Now, after 11 stable releases, version 1.0.0 of it is in Beta. This blog has been using it for the past 2 years now.
Java - Java 6 was about halfway through its life and Java 7 had just come out a year earlier.
Android - Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was the latest version when the blog opened up. But just over a week later, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) was released. Both of these are now obsolete as we are now on version 7.1 (Nougat).
iOS - iOS 5 was the latest version at the time the blog started. Later that year, iOS 6 came out. We are now on iOS 10 with iOS 11 already announced.
Windows - Windows 7 was still the current version of Windows at the time. I loved that operating system. Windows 8 came out in the autumn of that year (in fact, I wrote a bit about it). Of course we now have Windows 10.
Mac OS - At the time the blog started, OS X 10.7 Lion was the current Mac OS version. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came out a month later. We have now moved on from arctic animals (and the OS X name) and are on macOS 10.12 Sierra.
Hardware
The latest iPhone was the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 came out a few months later. The latest iPod was the iPod Touch 4 (now seems all but dead).
Samsung released the Galaxy S3 a couple of weeks after my first post (we are now on S8).
Neither Xbox One or Playstation 4s were even announced at this time and Nintendo didn't release the Wii U until near Christmas.
The original Raspberry Pi had only just been released just 4 months previously and was still very hard to get hold of.
The first MacBook Pro (3rd Generation) to have "Retina Display" had just come out.
So here we have just a small selection of things and what versions they were on 5 years ago. It is crazy how far things have come in such a small space of time. I have missed out a lot of things that didn't really exist back then but do now such as Live Video, 360 Photos/Video and VR to name a few.
Thank you to everyone that reads this blog even if it is just one article one time. I look forward to the next 5 years and writing the 10th anniversary post from Ghost 3.0 at the end of a long day coding in PHP 9.