# Messages to Friends

In 1997, I started occasionally sending emails to all of my friends that
I was in contact with by email.  At first simply listing them all as
recipients in a regular email, but later I maintained a proper
mailinglist for it.

My habits changed gradually, and by 2004 I no longer used that list -
posting news directly on my website instead.

When I learned about the concept of "blogging" I realized that in a way
that is what I had been practising back then, just not using the RSS or
Atom distribution mechanisms making proper blogging so extremely
efficient.

Now I decided to re-release my old Friends posts as modern blog entries,
for archival purposes.

Even if I didn't know about blogging, my web programming tool back then
was [Frontier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userland_Software#Frontier),
which later became one of the first blogging tools.  That happened after
a shift to a more commercial licensing model - an issue which back then
meant enough for me to abandon it, and now is essential to my approach
to computers.