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Section :: Editorial

- Format For Printing...

Now we are nine

Happy 2014 – and a look back to the start of Bitwise in 2005…
Wednesday 1 January 2014.
 

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been publishing Bitwise for almost nine years now. Up until 2005, I had been strictly a paper-printed journalist. I’d edited magazines, made videos for magazine cover discs and written innumerable articles and columns for many of the top-selling computer titles in the UK – PC Plus, PC Pro, Computer Shopper and many others.

But by 2005 it was clear to me that the printed page was no longer the primary medium for conveying technology information. If you want up-to-date information quickly, the place you are likely to look first is online.

My initial idea for Bitwise was to create an ‘online magazine’ – one which more less mimicked conventional print-based magazines. Accordingly, the early ‘editions’ of Bitwise were released monthly. They each came with an editorial, a ‘lead article’ and regular monthly columns. In the very first ‘issue’ we carried articles about copy protection and reviews of DVD copying software; there were programming columns on Delphi, C# and Visual Basic, an interview with Marc Hoffman (developer of ‘Chrome’ Object Pascal for .NET) and an interview with Microsoft’s Anders Hejlsberg. There were book reviews, software reviews and even reviews of web sites for learning languages. In fact, it was a pretty darn’ choc-full issue. See for yourself by going to the Editorial page and Table Of Contents.

My first Bitwise editorial from 2005. A lot has changed since then – even my beloved dog, Bethan, is no longer here :-( though I am kept on my toes by two of her daughters!

While I quite liked the magazine-based structure (probably because it was comfortably familiar to me), it soon became clear that online readers weren’t interested in browsing a web-based magazine in the way they might browse a paper-based one. So in the summer of 2006 I changed the structure to be much more fluid. The monthly releases were jettisoned, so were the static web pages. From July 2006 onwards, Bitwise articles were published using a CMS (Content Management System) called Spip – and that is the way they are published to this very day.

If you haven’t been following Bitwise since its inception, you may have missed out on a lot of good stuff. Over the next few weeks I will highlight a few particularly memorable articles. If you can’t wait that long, you can browse through the archives to Bitwise up to June 2006 HERE and from July 2006 to the present day HERE.

Once again, I hope you have a great 2014!

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