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 Bloggin' in the new year ... it's 2017, which means it is fourteen years since I started blogging, way back in the bad old days of early 2003. That means I get to add another "this date in:" link to my sidebar, and I get to add another row to the summary grid at the top of my archive. There you will find links to 3,282 posts. I can't believe how much time I've spent blogging, and yet... I can't help feeling that it was time well spent. It was fun, for one thing, and educational, and through blogging I've met many of you, some of whom have become good friends and a few even business partners. And I must confess I do like being able to see what I was doing and thinking this time in each year; I am probably the biggest user of my Flight link, which makes that vertical cut.
 Weirdly and unusually, I have not redesigned my blog; it looks almost exactly as it did fourteen years ago. I was an early pioneer with drop shadows, image maps, a right-side nav, and a chronological archive. And may I say, my site has stayed fast; flat teeny compressed HTML, baby, with no client-side crap. I was also wrong about a few things; frames, we hardly new ya, blog roulette, cute but useless, and blogroll, no longer a thing (sadly). I do still have a cool, fast, simple search, and have held on to those greatest hits in the sidebar, although they don't get many clicks. I didn't get RSS at first, and even thought aggregators are not good, but soon saw the light; I continue to think RSS is amazing, and it enables me to follow over 200 sites and blogs every day; click my OPML feed to see what I see. And way back in 2009 I started Tweeting links, and echoing posts to Facebook.
 So what's new for 2017? We'll have to see. I have no immediate plans to change anything about my blog, but I most definitely plan to start blogging again. I have a backlog of about 200 items to share with you, and will dribble them out among new things of interest. A lot of space stuff - it's been a good year for space! - and a lot of tech as usual, and of course a little social and political commentary, but I promise only a little.
(At right: This was NASA's tribute to Prince, after he died on 4/21/16)
Cheers and onward!
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