bauck.com – since 1998
One of the oldest continuously active personal blogs on the internet
An old internet classic
It began in the days of the early personal homepage, when having your own little corner of the internet still felt slightly experimental. My professor Espen Andersen at BI Norwegian Business School encouraged students to publish assignments online. I first put something up on a free homepage service, then quickly decided that having my own domain would be far more interesting. bauck.com was available, it cost 10 dollars, and that was all the convincing I needed.
Once I had the domain, I did not want to use it for a single assignment and leave it there. I started building pages in plain HTML with Windows Notepad, inspired by the early personal sites that were appearing around the same time. They made the web feel open, curious, and slightly improvised in the best possible way.
Back then, the site included the usual essentials of that era: a bit of biography on a basic About Me page, a CV, and a few pictures.
At a time when most people had heard of the internet but never actually seen it, a personal homepage was a rarity. bauck.com was there early, becoming one of the earliest personal websites on the internet.
That old start turned out to have a longer future than I could possibly have imagined. What began as a simple personal homepage in the late 1990s kept going, kept evolving, and kept finding new uses as life changed. That makes bauck.com one of the oldest continuously running blogs online, and certainly part of an older generation of personal sites that grew up with the web itself.
Early travel content
Then life moved on, and so did the site.
Around 2002, I moved to Kenya for what was supposed to be a one-year internship. I am still here. A new-found interest in photography, combined with a growing habit of moving around the continent, gave the website a new role. It became a place to publish images and stories from places that, at the time, were not exactly overrepresented online. In the early 2000s, there were far fewer pictures on the internet from many parts of Africa than there are now, and bauck.com slowly developed into a fairly substantial travel archive.
At one point, the site was drawing around 2,000 unique visitors a month. Some of the travel pages ranked surprisingly well in Google, which was a useful reminder that the internet could reward curiosity, consistency, and being early to a subject. In that sense, being old helped. The site had been around for years already, and over time it built up the kind of archive that only comes from sticking with something far longer than originally planned.
2009 – Enter the blogging era
For years, the site remained static. Every addition took a bit more effort than it should have, which naturally limited the pace. Then, in 2009, bauck.com moved to WordPress and entered a more modern era. That made it easier to expand the writing, grow the archive, and keep the whole thing alive without having to manually wrestle every page into existence.
The subject matter has changed over time, because life has changed over time. What started as a rough little personal homepage grew into a platform that now brings together entrepreneurship, advisory, speaking, writing, travel, photography, media, and more generally, ideas that seem worth putting into public view.
At the same time, the travel gallery grew substantially, together with my stories from the trail. While still multi-faceted, bauck.com was developing a strong edge on travel content.
So yes, it is partly a blog. It is also a long-running digital trail, continuously evolving since the early days of the internet.
A piece of internet legacy
I’ve been building Bauck.com and publishing online since the early web, long before that became standard personal-branding advice. What began as a simple experiment has turned into a small piece of internet history: a record of changing interests, different chapters of life, and a website that has managed to stay alive, active, and still evolving over nearly three decades.
In 1998, I had no idea where this blog would be in 2026, or that I would one day be writing this page.
An older and much simpler version of this story has been online for years, and it continues to attract a surprising number of visitors through searches related to internet heritage, early websites, old blogs, and long-running personal sites.
That, in turn, made me realise that Bauck.com is not only part of my own history. It also belongs to an older layer of the web that still exists, but is easy to overlook. The internet has become such a central part of modern life that it is easy to forget how recent it still is, and how little attention has been given to preserving its early personal history.
That is one reason I have chosen to keep older blog posts and legacy pages online, and to preserve their URLs wherever possible, even as the wider structure of the site has been adapted to its 2026 version.
