I have been maintaining a blog since Feb 2002 Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Blog.
I first used computers in the early 1980s when I got a ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum and tried to write programs in BASIC and save them to audio cassette tape. At school we also got access to an early PC that was a Research Machines RM 380Z, and I programmed a simple text-based adventure game populated by people from my class and various monsters. I did a non-examinable computer course in secondary school in Belfast even involved sending OCR cards into Queens University and getting the results the following week (basically you drew a line through a series of boxes to enter a character - one step up from punched cards).
I first used email when I studied English Literature and Computer Science at the University of Keele from 1983-1987. In the 4th year of computing we were allowed access directly to the Internet via UNIX terminals in the laboratory, up to then I'd had to use various gateways to access the Internet. I've been a UNIX fan and an Internet junkie ever since. I continued to use the Internet in Cambridge where I did an MPhil (taught) Computer Speech and Natural Language Processing, and in the University of Central Lancashire, in Preston, where I did an MPhil (research) in Knowledge Acquisition for Expert Systems. I learned a lot about PCs in Preston and had my own x286 at home.
Phase 1 of my involvement in web technologies began when I first heard about the web at the NSC92 conference (Network Services Conference) November 1992 in Pisa, Italy. I went back to University College Galway (UCG), now called NUI Galway, where I worked in computer services, very enthused. Within a year I had my own webserver and I was the webmaster for UCG's first website. I was very happy when the front page image from the website, a picture of the old quadrangle in UCG, was featured in the Irish Times in an article about the emerging web with the title "The West's Awake" (a reference to a famous Irish rebel song), this was Mon 3rd April 1995 (archive). At the time we would email some guys in UCD in Dublin running a server called Slarti (a reference to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy character), where a list and a map of active Irish websites was maintained - early UCG servers are still listed in this list from 1998; this lists 15 servers in UCG including my personal server (realt.ucg.ie - that actually stopped in September 1996 when I left) and including Joe Desbonet and John Breslin. I ended up getting really into Perl and CGI programming a published some books on this as well as being a webmaster in the first iteration of the web.
Phase 2 of my engagement in web technologies began when I moved to Waterford Institute of Technology (then WRTC) back in 1996, and got involved in some EU funded projects linked to the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) there. I became really enthused by the whole content aggregation technology suite, with the early versions of RSS from Netscape in the late 1990s, that we used in a project called NITOURA II, and later with weblogging/blogging, and the first version my blog (using first Greymatter then MovableType as the blogging platform).
Phase 3 of my web technology engagement has been via the telecommunications management work in the TSSG, based on the use of emerging semantic modelling techniques, in particular OWL-based solutions, and on applying these to the telecommunications network and service management space in the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) and in the new Autonomic Communications Forum (ACF) linked to our research programme on Autonomic Management of Communications of Networks and Services, that now has a follow-on project SFI SRC FAME.
When I first came to WIT in September 1996 I secured the use of a Linux box and configured it for use for on-line course notes for staff in P&Q and as a place for fourth year student projects to publish their documentatuon on the web (and use the machine a test platform). I beleved you could not teach students about the web without a mechanism for publishing their work on-line. This machine was actively used from 1996 to 2004, and was on-line until around 2010: http://emhain.wit.ie/ (archive).
WIT Computing Course Pages Some lecturers have chosen to make their course notes available throughout the Web, others have restricted access to within WIT. If you get an error accessing some pages and you are outside WIT, it is most likely because access has been restricted. Some of these course notes were prepared for previous year's courses. Make sure you check in your own class what is required this year. MSOF 2003-09-15 This new internal WIT website provides access to past papers: http://exams.wit.ie/ via the new WIT Content Management System (CMS). NC Computer Applications (Year 1) Programming (Michael McMahon) NC Multimedia (Year 2) Projects 2 (Colm Dunphy) ND Multimedia (Year 3) Projects 3 (Colm Dunphy) NC Commercial Computing (Year 1) NC Commercial Computing (Year 2) Data Structures (Michael McMahon) NC Industrial Computing (Year 1) Programming (Mícheál Ó Foghlú) Systems Analysis and Design (Ian Downey) NC Industrial Computing (Year 2) Systems Programming (Michael McMahon) Computer Interfacing and Control (Ian Downey) NC Information Technology Support (Year 1) Operating Systems 1 (Jimmy McGibney) NC Information Technology Support (Year 2) Operating Systems 2 (Jimmy McGibney) ND Commercial Computing ND Information Technology (Year 3) Distributed Information Systems (Jimmy McGibney/Mícheál Ó Foghlú) ND Information Technology Support (Year 3) Computer Services Management (Mícheál Ó Foghlú) BSc Applied Computing (Year 2) Computer Organisation (Diarmuid O'Connor) BSc Applied Computing (Year 3) Software Engineering (Diarmuid O'Connor) BSc Applied Computing (Year 4) Telecommunications Software (Elective) (Eamonn de Leastar, Sven van der Meer, Brendan Jennings, Miguel ponce de Leon, Mícheál Ó Foghlú) Project (Project Groups) BSc Commercial Software Development (Year 4) Bridging Studies UNIX (Mícheál Ó Foghlú) Data Communications & Distributed Systems (Richard Frisby) Enterprise Information Systems (Liam Doyle) Project (Project Groups)
From 2005 onwards I hosted such course notes on my own domain http://www.ofoghlu.net/mofoghlu.