How did I miss that last month was the 25th anniver­sary of my first blog­ging effort? Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront had a half-dozen posts a week and was tied to an email newslet­ter that went out every Fri­day (that’s pret­ty much the same for­mat as Quak­er Ranter in 2022!). This was before Dreamweaver, Blog­ger, Mov­able Type, Word­Press, etc. The word weblog was a few weeks from being coined. 

I put this all togeth­er using an absolute­ly ridicu­lous Microsoft Word macro that I had adapt­ed. I’d write a post in Word then hit a but­ton. A long string of search and replaces would start to run. For exam­ple, one search would look for bold­est text and put “<b>” and “</b>” around it. After half a minute or so it’d spit out an HTML file to my desk­top. I’d open an FTP pro­gram and upload the file to the serv­er. If I had an edit to make I’d have to go through the macro all over again. I was teach­ing myself HTML as I went along and it’s amaz­ing any of it dis­played properly. 

Still, it’s remark­able that while so much of back end has changed and changed again over the decades, the final for­mat is instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as a blog. The Quak­er Ranter archives now list over 1,300 articles.

The Ear­ly Blog­ging Days 

I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org in late 1995 as a place to pub­li­cize the work of the US peace movement…

Quak­er Ranter