http://www.sivasothi.com/

“Wild Lives: Siva,” by Ria Tan. WildSingapore, 2004.

iBlog, my blogging history (work in progress).

1998 - Onelist make mailing lists communities easy to setup and join. I set up the Habitat Group’s mailing list and provide two services to the public - Ecotax and Habitatnews. I also join ME@N, a macintosh user group out of NTU that I learn about from Gregory Chan.

1999 - NUS Faculty of Science’s CITA provides me with server space when I attend a two hour course to learn how to setup a webpage. Jasmin Chua suggests I blog. I also try Blogger but get confused with server settings and decide, “maybe later!” I concentrate on quickly providing and editing static content to organise projects and maintaining my mailing lists communities. I buy the domain sivasothi.com.

Mar 2003 - Bernard Teo demonstrates blogging with Samizdat, which he says is a marginal modification of PHPosxom, which is in turn based on Blosxom. Jun 2003 - During a Mac Meetup at his office, he conducts a tutorial about Samizdat for me and I take notes. Aug 2003 - carefully following the instructions I wrote down, I start Otterman speaks… after some hiccups. That provisional title is never changed.

Dec 2003 - Lekowala starts blogging. Student mangrove researchers are made to use blogs to host their field logs. I dig out and follow made-in-Singapore blogs with a keen eye. Jan 2004 - Alvin starts blogging, and we decide on Blogger after a demonstration of Samizdat makes me realise it is a little challenging. Thus when blogging is discussed at the monthly mac meetup, I now recommend Blogger and LiveJournal.

Feb 2004 - I adopt Samizdat for Habitatnews, the first nature and environment blog in Singapore. Although the blog setup takes a few minutes, I spend 6 hours fiddling with the design and cleanup up the server directory.

Mar 2004 - Debby Ng meets me in Holland Village to discuss her environmental concerns after a recent dive trip. I direct her to blogging and get her started on the spot using my trusty 14.1″ iBook. I suggest the provisional name “a href=”http://habitatnews.nus.edu.sg/news/pulauhantu/archive/2004_03_01_archive.html”>“Pulau Hantu - a celebration of marine life,” again this sticks. Debby a writer, posts regularly at this first marine conservation blog in Singapore. It becomes a rallying point for divers and the biodiversity community concerned about the fate of our marine life.

Apr 2004 - I turn my attention to the Raffles Museum Latest News page, thinking to involve other museum staff could be involved in posting news directly. Pivot is examined but discarded as too complex.

Samizdat doesn’t provide individual date-stamping and I raise this at the at the monthly mac meetup. Seng Aik mulls over this and later, on an overnight fault-finding session via iChat, he fixes this and the search function - we finally finish after 4am.

The NUS Science Open House team reports on feedback about the event and blogs provide the best source of true comments.

May 2004 - I mention blogging as a useful communicative tool at a database workshop in KL and one participant nods in repeated agreement with many simple things I suggest. he turns out to be Chang, the IT guy behind the Subang Jaya e-community. He introduces me via email to Jeff Ooi who pens the very impressive Screenshots in Malaysia.

I abandon phpetal as too tough. Realising I am the only person who will be posting, I decide to use Samizdat engine for Raffles Museum News. It is the first museum blog in Singapore and turns out to be one of the first in the world and probably so for natural history museums.

Blogger is acquired by Google and is revamped. We adopt a new templates for the Pulau Hantu blog which looks lovely! I also shift the blog to the Habitatnews server to provide Debby with unlimited space and a means to post photos.

I start two more shared blogs: the first is Pulau Ubin Stories which captures nature and heritage stories of Ubin in support of the volunteer programme, Pedal Ubin. The second is The Biology Refugia with a few other friends to keep discussions about non-molecular biology alive.

These blogs are hosted on the Habitatnews and my staff servers to allow easy image uploading. I also share notes I picked up about front-end editing and emailing entries with all my collaborators - these tools that make blogging easier.

Jun 2004 - Some mistake with ftp and all the earlier Raffles Museum news entries get date-stamped as 24 June 2004. This is a vulnerability in the way I use the blososxom family of tools so now I use date-indexed filenames to preserve the chronological sequence to pre-empt a future problem (it never happens again, thankfully). I get Leong Wai to start up the Labrador Rocky Shore blog.

Jul 2004 - Jasmn Chua, former mangrove apprentice, now a writer and editor in NY and the first to encouraged me to blog in the late 90’s, terminates swisscheesed.

Aug 2004 - I setup the Cycling in Singapore blog for a small cycling/urban transport discussion group, as a means to archive and later contribute coherent ideas to. Paul Barter goes on to setup the Urban Transport Issues Asia blog.

Picasa bring pictures for free to blogger! The NDP 2004 blog project illustrates you can’t manufacture blogging. Ria Tan participates with great volume and converts her content to static pages later.

Oct 2004 - I reproduce Vicki Ho’s blog entry, with permission, in Raffles Museum News and we become online friends.

Dec 2004 - I toy with methods to link my blogs , trying out zFeeder, feedburner, and bloglines. Hope to fix image appearances in my RSS feeds by year-end.

May 2005 - The height of my blog evangelism, I present to the Museum Roundtable. They enjoy the talk, but the overworked museum roundtable community probably just see it as more work.

Jun 2005 - I opt out using meetup.com when they decide to charge and attendance drops after two years of monthly meetups; everyone gets busy. So I decide to take a break but shift the webpage to Mac Meetup Singapore and a mailing list that will allow non-ME@Ners to find us. This series of mac meetups date back to 1999.

My old botany professor, Wee Yeow Chin starts up the Bird Ecology Study Group blog after just a couple of short conversations!

Feb 2006 - I join the Yesterday.sg discussion and this NHB-fueled blog gets started soon after. It is the first government-community blog.

2006 - I stopped being a blogging evangelist (conducting workshops) in museum and nature circles, when I realise those who can, will. It’s not for everyone but many nature bloggers emerge and I am happy at least to have had a direct hand with Debby Ng and Wee Yeow Chin.

Dec 2006 - I use WordPress for the first time, when I sail “Aboard the Götheborg” in December. Cut off from the internet and too busy coping, I don’t write much but its enough for a primer for articles in future.

Jan 2007 - I start the department blog - The Biodiversity Crew @ NUS.

Apr 2007 - I gingerly start my first NUS Module blog and in the following semester, start four more. I update relevant content after each lectures.

May 2007 - I make my interns blog (Raffles Museum Internship) and revive my 2004 exercise of making all my research students blog.

Jul 2007 - I shift Raffles Museum News to wordpress and hand it over as I am leaving the museum for the department to teach full-time.

Sep 2007 - I am too ill on the morning of the coastal cleanup, so I stay at home and start “News from the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore”, also on WordPress. It turns out to be prophetic for the NUS server fails and I post the 2007 results on a page in the site. I use Ecto and MarsEdit to update the blog.

Nov 2007 - Ria Tan finally switches to a blog engine for her updates on WildSingapore. I announce this on Habitatnews which I intend to slow down to a halt.

Oct 2007 - I migrate the Toddycats blog to WordPress.

Jan 2008 - My blog loads too slowly on the science server so I shift Otterman speaks to wordpress.

Apr 2008 - the first NUS Student Module blog assignments are attempted for the LSM1303 class of 200 and it turns out pretty well. The main module blog, meanwhile, becomes part of required readings.