Back when I started blogging in 2005-ish, I had a few blogs that destructed due to bad software or databases. My Sixth World News and Commentary site just stopped working one day and I couldn’t recover any posts. I was a tech newbie so I didn’t know how to do SQL dumps and try to save over a years worth of work.

Wordpress came along and changed all that by making blogging more robust and fun. Then the blog explosion happened. We had Blog Carnivals, blog circle links, many new blogs popping up every week. Over time I made many online friends with many bloggers. I had found my tribe. I posted about the markets, Forex, investing, and machine learning. Suddenly my blog took off because of my RapidMiner tutorials and the rest is history.

12 years later and I discover some old posts that I had archived. I started reposting (backfilling) a lot of those posts and inadvertently took a stroll down memory late. I noticed that a lot of the old links to blogs that no longer work but some still do.

I decided to do some digging and find out whatever happened too…

UglyChart

One of my most favorite blogs was UglyChart. Mike was one of the first people to code all kinds of neat trading intelligence stuff. His ’new all-time highs’ and ’new all-time lows’ daily list was invaluable. He built a trading bot and posted the trials and tribulations of it on a weekly basis. He’s since shut down the blog and is now a successful Domain catcher. Good for him.

Maoxian

Maoxian started his daily day-trading tips back in 2005 with his “Dummy method.’ He posted pretty regularly for a long time till he moved to China and back. He was offline for a few years and his posting suffered. Luckily, his blog has survived and he posts semi-weekly now, mostly about movie reviews. Rumor has it he’s day trading again and he does share some tidbits here and there. His notes on Trader Interviews are invaluable.

TraderMike

I loved TraderMike’s blog. His daily market recaps were the best and he was so sharing with everything he did. He was an electrical engineer turned software developer turned swing trader. He automated a lot of his stock selection and traded the ‘swings.’ He sold TraderMike several years ago and it’s not the same anymore. He’s moved on to SwingTradeBot now and appears to be living the dream.

TraderGav

TraderGav is still kicking around but he doesn’t post as much as he used too. He’s a full-time Forex trader and trading platform developer. We’re friends on Facebook and he’s busy being a Dad. I loved his Forex chart reads and he’s one of the reasons why I got into Forex trading in the first place. Hopefully his blog will be re-energized one day.

Grace Cheng

Grace had a great Forex trading website where she posted her mechanical trading tips for currencies. She wrote a book and become a small sensation in the Forex circles. She has since redirected her site to some credit card reward program site. It looks like she’s a busy mom now of two kids and travels the world with her partner. Good for her.

Jaloti

Jaloti cracked me up. Jaloti was just short for “Just another loser on the Internet.” He had a brief but funny blog but then disappeared.

Howard Lindzon

Howard burst on the blogging scene back in 2007 with his Wall Strip video show. It was great, hilarious, and he sold it for $60 million to CBS. CBS promptly shut it down (dumbasses). He remains a blogging force to be reckoned with and remade himself from a hedge fund manager to a VC guy that manages a hedge fund. He’s the right mix of humor and self-deprecating humor that I love. I have still yet to meet him but I have his mobile number somewhere.

From Blogs too?

It’s amazing how fast time goes. Taking a minute to look from where you came from is equally important than just charging ahead too somewhere in the future. Like a lot of the bloggers above, I wrote a lot of blog posts between 2007 and 2010 and then dropped off. I was lucky enough to discover my love of machine learning by writing here. This love landed me a gig with RapidMiner and now H2O.ai.

I’m happy that many of the old bloggers have transformed themselves into some better and/or cooler from their writings as well. That makes me happy. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re passionate about something. You learn, you create, you make. You see, kids, it’s possible to ’live the dream’ if you put your passion to paper. At least it is for me.

• Personal Development