THROWBACK THURSDAY: Post #1

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The world has changed an awful lot since this blog was started. It’s amazing to think that when this blog was founded, Google had only been part of our lives for a handful of years. There were still a lot of people who were on dial-up. Streaming didn’t exist, but Blockbuster Video did. Every so often I like to look through the Archives section of this blog and see how things have changed.

A little bit of history

The Solid Signal Blog was founded in 2007. Personally, I took over the reins in 2012, and I’ve tried to uphold a certain standard. I try to give you the best content on the web for satellite, cellular, and antenna enthusiasts, plus a healthy dose of fun and games so you don’t completely fall asleep.

I guess the guy before me wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. Some of the posts you’ll find from those pre-2012 days are ok, but most of them are really really short, and really really uninteresting. A lot of them didn’t survive the move across three different platforms that resulted in the blog you see here today. Sadly, though, most of them did and they’re not all incredibly inspiring.

Post #1

Technically the first post on this blog, the oldest one we can find, is from February, 2007.  Unfortunately, it’s a cut-and-paste of a Newsweek article. Not too interesting. If you want real original content, you have to look a month later in March, 2007 to an article that was published about heavy-duty satellite mounts. It’s not so bad really, if a little salesy. It even looks pretty good in our current blog format, although if you look at the original version (courtesy of archive.org) it’s not as fancy. Looking at the source code, there may have been some graphics there that have long since been lost to time. A few years ago, I loaded up WordPress 2.1 and restored the old database. You can see what the blog probably looked like, here.

Of course, that was an astounding 16 years ago and the standard for a good looking web site has changed just a little. Since then, we’ve published a total of about 13,000 articles. 9,000 of them can be found at this web site. The rest of them weren’t migrated here for various reasons. Unfortunately, migrating to the current platform in 2018 was a very manual process. About half the articles I had written were so out of date that I chose not to migrate them. You can dig through archive.org to see some of them, but I promise they are nothing special. If I get incredibly bored, I do have a copy of the old database and I could restore them.

Post #10,000?

It will take about another eight months for this blog to reach 10,000 posts. That’s a pretty big milestone. I’m not sure yet what that post will be. I’m hoping to have a big celebration for that, and another one for this blog’s 20th anniversary in early 2027. Will you be there? I certainly hope so.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.