25 January 1999 was my first day at W3C. I was 23 years old when I started. I’ve now spent more than half my life at that. I regret nothing because I find the work I do really interesting, important, meaningful; and I don’t tire of it because I feel like there’s renewal every now and then. I’ve held many positions, worn many hats, learned a lot of things and I work with incredibly smart and dedicated people. This has been and is very rewarding.
Coralie at her desk. Photo of February 1999. Resolution of 640x480px, because: early digital cameras!
I selected a highlight for each year (in many cases it was hard to choose just one, so I didn’t) for a retrospective:
1999: Meeting in Toronto; my first transatlantic flight
2000: Organized the first W3C TPAC in Europe: TPAC 2001, Mandelieu
2001: Started to code my personal website (koalie.net)
2002: Training in management
2003: Elected staff representative (per French Labour law)
2004: Was asked to consider joining the W3C Comm Team
2005: Joined the Comm Team (half-time); became staff contact of the W3C Advisory Board (a role I held for 12 years)
2006: Moved to Boston to work 9 months at MIT as a “Visiting Scholar”
2007: Handed off the management of the W3C Europe team’s travels, budgets and policies
2008: Joined the Comm Team full-time; organized my last big meeting: TPAC 2008 + Team Day, in Mandelieu
2009: Learn to edit the W3C website
2010: Put W3C on social media, and Tim Berners-Lee on Twitter
2011: Interviewed for a job elsewhere but failed after round 3
2012: Co-wrote the first draft of the W3C code of ethics and professional conduct
2013: Training in product management; First presentation in front of W3C Members (on how incubated work moves to the standardization track)
2014: Spearheaded “Webizen”, a first attempt to open W3C Membership to individuals; Re-elected Staff Representative
2015: Became Head of the W3C Comm Team
2016: Survived year one of the Encrypted Media Extensions public relations nightmare
2017: Stopped being the AB Team contact; Survived year two of EME PR nightmare
2018: Management of the W3C “diversity fund” to financially help people who are from under-represented communities attend TPAC; Re-elected Staff Representative
2019: Go-to-Market strategy for W3C’s legal entity; Narrative strategy for fundraising in the future
2022: Re-elected Staff Representative; Website public content re-write; second attempt to open W3C Membership to individuals; proposed W3C internal re-organization; burn-out
2023: W3C Website launch; got COVID for the first time; Humane Technology Design certification; e(X)filtration of the W3C Twitter account and moved it full-time to Mastodon (an instance we operate ourselves)
It is as likely as anything else that I will finish my career at the Web Consortium. I wouldn’t mind!
This blog was hosted on wordpress.com in 2013-2023, and displayed at koalie.blog since 2018. This setup expires –and will close– in July 2024.
These are my notes for future me and whoever may be curious.
Blogging software
I’ve been blogging offline since 2005 (I used a local instance of Blosxom as a diary which I kept for myself via a terminal on my laptop) and online since 2006 (on my friend Amy’s blog Dullicious where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years, and on My Opera). My previous migration in 2013 moved my blog from My Opera (which Opera shut down four months after) to wordpress.com.
All this time my website koalie.net was hosted for free on a shared server in one of the machine rooms at MIT and I could not easily get any blogging software installed, so my blog had to be separate from my website.
But last year’s infamous Gandi dick move was both a curse and a blessing. Ditto an internal decision at work that free hosting for personal websites was ending by year end as a result of W3C moving out of MIT in January 2023.
Domain name, email, Web hosting
In June 2023, Gandi announced that the free e-mail service included with domain name rental was becoming a paying subscription by year end, as well as a general increase of their prices the following month. For email, I was using 2 boxes (for me and my son), so that meant paying an extra € 115/year. So I resolved to get email elsewhere and set up a redirect on Gandi mail. For domain name rental, I had renewed it for 5 years in January 2022, so I’m all set until February 2027.
I chose to register in July a free email account at Infomaniak (more than one in fact –for me, my son, my dad), and then the day after Christmas subscribed separately for € 82,80/year the Infomaniak Web Bundle hosting plan that offers 250 GB storage, for up to 20 sites, and the ability to install and manage over 100 web applications and CMS. I’m sharing that space with a colleague of mine. In February 2027, I’ll rent the koalie.net domain name with them too.
I activated ssh and was able in minutes via rsync to move my website content from the external hard drive it lives on, onto the web hosting.
I figured I now could at last unite my blog and my website! My wordpress.com subscription for the Starter Plan costs € 42/year and the koalie.blog domain name rental costs € 22/year, so a total of € 64/year (since I signed up for it in 2018, it has cost me € 320+)
So I painlessly installed the WordPress web app on my Infomaniak space.
Exporting from wordpress.com
I was able to export a lot of my wordpress.com data (a 6.3 MB XML file once unzipped) and import it in the self-hosted WordPress app I installed on Infomaniak as a sub-domain of koalie.net: 495 blog posts and 150+ comments.
That’s not everything, though. I was dismayed that the media items aren’t part of the export. They remain hosted on wordpress.com and the blog posts that reference them continue to link to the files on wordpress.com. Similarly, themes settings and blog settings aren’t exported. Finally, all links in blog posts and pages are absolute. In my case, I had a mix of links to coraliemercier.wordpress.com (2005-2018) and koalie.blog (2018-2023).
Importing and fixing my blog
I exported my wordpress.com media items (3.06 GB for about 1300 files sorted by year and month). Then I spent many mind-numbing hours (over 80h) uploading them post by post.
In addition to adding back the media files, I wanted to write the alternative texts (wordpress.com is very bad at nudging bloggers to write any alt text and even if you think of it, the blogging workflow makes it difficult, I found), to check and fix the links (so now most if not all of my blog links start with / and don’t include the domain name), and remove all of the posts that included media from the Instagram account I deleted many years ago.
At the moment I’m using the same theme I was using in wordpress.com: Twenty Fifteen. For the theme settings and the blog settings, I put two windows side by side and compared the pages to click through the options and fiddle to replicate what I had. There are a few differences but nothing that bothers me.
It’s costly to leave wordpress.com
I used my Christmas vacation to make a dent in the massive undertaking of re-uploading my media files and then checking each post for quality assurance. That’s the first intangible cost: time.
The second cost is intangible as well: the loss of the wordpress.com network effect (ability to find new blogs from fellow wordpress.com users, and for them to find and “follow” min), and of wordpress.com’s SEO (which only can explain that my blog had consistent hits every day.)
On wordpress.com that blog had 156 subscribers, and received 46,112 views (4.6K/month on average) from 28,123 visitors. Its most popular day was April 29, 2020 with 772 views. The visits picked up near the end of 2019, so in the past 5 years, the average views were 5.3K/month.
I don’t care that much but I’m pretty sure that after 10 years of being used to these figures (however artificial they are), I will feel the difference!
koalie.blog all time total views by months and years
The third cost, which I chose not to incur, is the tangible cost of redirection of a wordpress.com blog elsewhere on the Web. It costs € 13/year.
What I did instead was to trash all of my posts on the wordpress.com end and replace that blog with just one static page as homepage, and a blog post, announcing that the setup was going to expire and close in July 2024.
koalie.blog static page as homepage
Looks of my blog over the years
Screenshot of my My Opera blogScreenshot of the WordPress.com blog using the Bueno themekoalie.blog on wordpress.com using the Twenty Fifteen theme
My self-hosted wordpress blog using the Twenty Fifteen theme in white and light grey
2023 is the fourth year in a row I’ve been exercising daily. This is a review post of my exercising year 2023, similar to the summaries I wrote for 2022, 2021 and 2020.
2023 was another good year where I got a lot of fulfillment out of exercising. I’ve worked out everyday except 3 days, discovered new sports, purchased a new e-mountain bike (the one I would have purchased last year if it had been available!)
Raw numbers
Highlights of 2023:
488h of exercise (= 20 days)
509 workouts (1.4/day)
1716 km on feet (4.7/day)
Walked under 300 km
Ran under 70 km
Cycled nearly 2800 km (233/month)
Monthly challenges
This year again I earned all of the monthly challenges suggested by my Apple Watch. They are determined based on recent activities and are meant to either keep you at the same level or elevate you a bit, so that at the end of the year you have improved your fitness.
14x 4.08 km
14x 67 min exercise
5x double “move”
27x close 3 rings
14x 564 kcal
4x outdoor cycling
4x double “move”
14x 613 kcal
14x walk/run 3.95 km
14x 80 min exercise
10x double “move”
14x walk/run 3.93 km
New gear
Me riding my Nakamura eSummit 950s (picture by Daniel Dardailler)
My furthest cycling this year was on 15 December: 67 km (which my Apple Watch recorded as 69 km).
I rode with DanielD and Pascale around Valbonne and then continued solo for more time on the bike and followed the canal as much as I could from Plascassier to Peymeinade, and then headed around Mount Peygros and down to Auribeau, Pégomas and back home.
69 km, 5h15, 13 km/h average, 1265 m elevation.
Aside: car vs. bike usage
I drove 2800 km in 2023 (less than 50km/week on average) and bought 150 liters of fuel (3 tanks).
This year, out-of-the-ordinary drives included going to see Isabelle for a few days last Summer in her husband’s house in Vaucluse, and driving to Marseilles with my brother so we could attend the funeral of our father’s sister.
Instead of my car I used my bike 55 times in 2023 (equivalent to once a week on average), covered 620 km and it took me 31 hours.
That includes cycling to the office the 8 times I went there this year (I usually work from home), and cycling back and forth the 5 days of a mandatory training in Grasse last November.
Activity map
This map of the area shows my tracks:
Orange: cycling
Green: walking/hiking
Yellow: running
Repeating tracks are indicated by a more contrasted colour.
Year in sport 2023 (Strava)
2023 year in sport: days active2023 year in sport: workouts and times2023 year in sport: longest activity, distance and elevation
More graphs
Health graphs: exercise minutesHealth graphs: active energyHealth graphs: workouts, distance on feet, stepsHealth graphs: workouts and cycling distanceHealth graphs: activity, weightHealth graphs: heart
