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Although I had previously played around creating various mini-sites, today marks the 20th Anniversary of the initial posts onto my first _durable_ site (`benscomputer.no-ip.org`), which would eventually evolve into this blog. I've always primarily written about tech, but have also never sought to limit myself to it. As a result, I've written about a range of topics including privacy, dogs, health, legal dealings, solar, vehicle maintenance and even creating furniture. Life comes with highs and lows and, while I haven't always written _about_ the lows, I have attempted to continue to write _through_ most of them. The aim of this post is to take a quick look back over my first twenty years of publishing. By it's very nature, this kind of post can be a _little_ self-indulgent, so I've made a conscious effort to try and keep that to a minimum. Admittedly, I **did** get a little carried away with some of the statistics. * * * ### Contents * Contents * The Early Days * Then & Now * Posting Stats * Post Tagging * Words * Highlights * Conversations * Conclusion * * * ### The Early Days Much like my current site, benscomputer.no-ip.org was self-hosted. The site lived on an old Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic P300 connected to the (_extremely_ modest) broadband connection that I'd arranged for the HMO that I was living out of at the time. The PC wasn't dedicated to hosting - it was also my day-to-day driver (something that didn't change until I got over-excited after misreading a pricing label in Cash Converters. It wasn't until I got home that I noticed I'd paid 10x more for the second hand Thinkpad than I'd meant to. They refused to refund and I spent the rest of the month hungry as a result). Although I was _interested_ in tech, I wasn't yet working in it - I was a sales assistant in a small Threshers branch. I'd created websites by hand before, but I remember wanting my focus to be on _what I was writing about_ and so chose to use OpenOffice to create the first posts. The traces of that are visible in the page metadata: <meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (Linux)"> <meta name="AUTHOR" content="Ben Tasker"> <meta name="CREATED" content="20051007;20080000"> Everything was implemented using inline HTML, I didn't start using CSS until nearly a year later (and even then, only after someone on a forum had convinced me of it's potential). On the first day, I actually published **two** posts, with one following directly on from the other (in hindsight, it does feel a bit "_and another thing..._ "). * DRM is evil * DRM has to be stopped I later changed the site from static HTML to a self-written CMS which used Server Side Includes to populate content by calling BASH scripts. One odd consequence of that transition is that those first two posts appear in the wrong order on the archived copy of the site's index (something that, apparently, has taken twenty years for me to notice). * * * #### Then & Now I can't say that those early posts are something that I feel _particularly_ proud of: My early writing style was _very_ different to the one that I've grown into. A contemporary example of that can be seen by comparing my recent post on ID cards to one on the same topic in 2007. They are both quite opinionated and I now write at quite a bit more length, but the newer post (IMO) makes for much more comfortable and convincing reading. For example, in the earlier post, I wrote: > Quite frankly I believe Mr Blair has his head buried in one of two places, either the sand or his own, probably best not to go there. This is quite an awkward passage to read. I can _hear_ my younger self saying it, but it still doesn't read that way. The newer post contains significantly more reference to stats and metrics, but also makes a statement of authority: > There is, though, a simple truth which underpins all of this: there are **no** simple solutions to systemic issues. Whether it's illegal immigration, political corruption, terrorism or inequality, anyone who promises that "this one thing" will address it is either mistaken or lying. Read in context, both passages convey that the Government are full of shit, but the more recent one does so in a _much_ more accessible manner. Though they may not be to my (current) taste, my early posts **are** still an important part of what led me to where I am now. Although my previous writing style now feels a little awkward and unfamiliar, the posts _do_ also include details that are still part of my life today: > Secondly completely boycott ANY DRM CDs, non DRM versions are usually availbale [sic], so contact the vendor and ask for a DRM free version. I _still_ look for options without Digital Rights Management and contact publishers/authors to ask if un-encumbered options exist. Admittedly, because of the spread that consumer hostile technologies have achieved, I _do_ now allow myself a few more options than I did before: 1. Find unencumbered option 2. Can I get by without it? 3. Take the encumbered option, strip the DRM and send a grumpy email 4. Go without Of course, my writing style wasn't the _only_ thing to change with time - the site did too and, in June 2011, I launched `bentasker.co.uk`. Since then, the site has been through multiple iterations, most of which are captured in a post that I wrote when migrating to Joomla! 3 (before later moving to Nikola). The sitehistory tag also contains screenshots of each era of the site. * * * ### Posting Stats I don't routinely collect stats about my posting activity. They're are also a bit harder to come by with static sites because there isn't a convenient database to run queries against. So, I hacked together a script to scrape posting information from `www.bentasker.co.uk` and the `benscomputer.no-ip.org` archive. The script was then able to write simple stats into a time series database for querying and visualisation: Note: the overlap between `bentasker.co.uk` and `benscomputer.no-ip.org` exists because (in an effort to ensure that it was preserved) I started republishing some old content. However, I eventually found a _meaningful_ backup of the original site and published the archive instead. Over the last 20 years, there, quite visibly, have been _some_ gaps in posting. Some of those gaps are larger than others, but if we chart out the number of months, per year, with at least one posting we can see that some years _really did_ fare worse than others: 2017 did really poorly, with me neglecting the site for _8 months_ of the year. Most of the years with big misses, though, seem to be because I was focusing on something else. For example, if we factor in posting to `snippets.bentasker.co.uk`, I only actually missed 3 months of 2017. There are still exceptions to this, though, and I've written in the past about sometimes suffering from writers block. Breaking my posts down by category leads to a _messy_ chart, but if we look at the proportional makeup of the 10 biggest categories, we can see quite a significant bias towards Linux documentation1 `documentation:linux` and `blog:general` are both quite broad categories, so their dominance isn't too surprising. What _is_ quite interesting, though, is seeing `blog:house stuff` in third place: I only launched that category in 2021, so it's only taken four years for it to start to break into the top three (our solar probably has a lot to do with that). If we chart out the top 3 categories per year, we can also start to see how what I've chosen to write about most has shifted over the years: In many ways, this is a reflection of how _my_ life has changed and, in particular, how I spend my free time. Some of it is borne out of necessity rather than choice, but I now spend a lot more time doing things around the house than I do fiddling with new software. * * * #### Post Tagging Tag based stats only represent more recent posts - the concept of attaching tags to posts didn't really exist when I first started and wasn't available in Joomla! until 2013. My site's JSONFeed includes details of which tags are applied to each post: { "id": "https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/privacy/id-cards-come-around-again.html", "url": "/posts/blog/privacy/id-cards-come-around-again.html", "title": "ID Cards Have Come Around Again", "date_published": "2025-10-03T21:21:00+00:00", "tags": [ "blog", "id cards", "identity", "privacy", "united kingdom" ] This makes calculating stats on tagging frequency quite easy: import requests from collections import Counter tag_counters = {} r = requests.get("https://www.bentasker.co.uk/feed.json") for entry in r.json()["items"]: for t in entry["tags"]: if t not in tag_counters: tag_counters[t] = 0 tag_counters[t] += 1 # Turn into a counter c = Counter(tag_counters) # Exclude top-level category names # unsurprisingly, they dominate excludes = [ "documentation", "blog", "republished", "video" ] # Maintain a counter - we're going # to be excluding entries but still # want to show the top 10 x = 0 for t in c.most_common(30): if t[0] in excludes: continue print(f"{t[0]}: {t[1]} posts") x += 1 if x >= 10: break This indicates that the top 10 most used tags on `www.bentasker.co.uk` are: Tag | Uses ---|--- linux | 99 howto | 92 security | 81 privacy | 73 house stuff | 67 release notes | 48 infosec | 45 vehicles | 43 software | 39 opinion | 37 There _is_ a limiting factor here, though: I've used a _huge_ number of tags over the years, which (until recently) left my tags listing looking somewhat ridiculous: The density of this made it quite difficult for me to skim read existing tags when publishing new posts, so there are likely to be more than a few posts which are missing at least one relevant tag. * * * #### Words Given that I'm talking about writing, it'd be remiss of me not to take a peek at word count. | Words | Profanities | Profanity Ratio | Avg Words Per Post ---|---|---|---|--- `benscomputer.no-ip.org` | 220,586 | 102 | 1:2163 | 585.1 `www.bentasker.co.uk` | 865,570 | 244 | 1:3548 | 1059.4 **Total** | **1,086,085** | **346** | **1:3139** | **909.7** The total word count is actually quite a bit lower than I expected. I suspect, too, that the rate of profanity is quite a bit lower than _people who know me_ would expect. Python's `collections.Counter` allows us to check which words I'm most likely to use: c = Counter(profanity_counter) for t in c.most_common(20): print(f"{t[0]}: {t[1]}") The top place makes sense, because I used to have a software project called BUGGER. The second place also makes sense because, well, I **do** use that word quite a lot in day to day life. Which leads me to something quite interesting. Earlier in this post, I observed that my original writing style was quite conversational: I wrote things, more or less, as I would _say_ them. Combining that with `benscomputer.no-ip.org` having a higher proportion of profanity, I would _expect_ that it also included a _wider_ range of that vocabulary. But... that's **not** the case - in fact, it's not even possible to populate a top 10: bugger: 74 fuck: 15 shit: 5 cock: 4 bollocks: 2 knob: 2 If we assume that every use of `bugger` was in relation to the software project, the rate of profanity on `benscomputer.no-ip.org` drops considerably: once every 7876 words. I've always sworn a lot, a condition that was exacerbated by working with the military, but the increase can't be driven by that because those years passed while I was still posting to `benscomputer.no-ip.org`. So... when did it start? There was a fairly low frequency of posts with profanity, but the rate spiked in 2021, recovered and then remained in an elevated position from late 2022 onwards. That increase _broadly_ aligns with me coming off of Twitter: had I still been on Twitter, it's quite possible that some of the swearier posts would have instead been Twitter threads. Curiously, we don't see the same trend when looking at the _number_ of profanities per month: So, I've written _more posts_ containing profanity, but the overall level of swearing isn't much higher than it was in 2018. It's not _entirely_ clear why that is. * * * ### Highlights Over the last 20 years, I've published quite a _lot_ of content - there are 819 posts on `bentasker.co.uk`, with another 700 on `benscomputer.no-ip.org`. It feels a little strange to use the word "adventure" in relation to sitting at a computer and writing, but over the years I've had and documented a range of experiences. Distilling those down to a small set of highlights is, inevitably, quite difficult, but the following are the experiences that have stuck in my mind: * Taking a (now defunct) ISP through arbitration * Convincing a local council to make their permit parking system more inclusive * Creating a children's book * Being part of the fight against the introduction of Phorm in the UK * Messing around with Powerline adapters (and later discovering a vulnerability in them) * Writing about health and medication issues and living with chronic pain * Having my research into the "unhackable" Bitfi cryptowallet referenced at Defcon by a researcher _dressed as Pikachu_ * Catching a digital intelligence outfit in the course of making a mistake * Giving my fishtank an IP address * Mistreating Bing's AI Chat, Perplexity and Deepseek (warning: there isn't enough mind bleach _in the world_) * Hyperfocusing on packet captures and the behaviour of Golang's net/http * Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell Nuclear Power Station control room simulator * Creating a TV station * Somehow getting mistaken for a qualified battery storage engineer _by the supplier_ * "Dating" a romance scammer Of course, it's not _all_ been sweetness and honey - I've also had legal threats, abusive emails, nuisance abuse complaints and sometimes quite concerted efforts to compromise the site. But, the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. * * * #### Conversations Blogging _sounds_ like a one-way interaction: I post something and then people (hopefully) read what I've written. But, I've never found that to truly be the case. Over the years, I've had a lot of wonderful conversations with people who've read _something_ that I've written and felt motivated enough to contact me about it (whether via email or social media). Some made contact to provide feedback, others had questions that my post didn't answer and _occasionally_ it was to let me know that motivated them to do or create something (DNSChat seems to have been _particularly_ good at that). I've always written _for me_ , but there's something quite gratifying about finding out that it's helped someone else. * * * ### Conclusion I've never been _particularly_ prone to looking to the future, but I don't think that I'd ever have expected to still be _enjoying_ writing 20 years later. One of the things that has really stood out to me while preparing this post, is just how different my writing style has become. My writing used to be _extremely_ conversational and _very_ opinionated. Although that change is a good thing, it does make me wonder what my writing style might be in another 20 years time. Over the years, I've been extremely fortunate in having the time and opportunity to explore and write about quite a range of things. It's been **a lot** of fun and, hopefully, the next few decades will be too. For me, Microsoft ~~Bing AI Chat~~ CoPilot summed it up best: * * * 1. BTW, I use Arch ↩

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