Connected Internet was three years old a few months ago. I totally missed the anniversary and I hadn’t realised I’d been blogging for that long, and I still find it funny that something that I started to test blogging platforms to potentially launch a blogging service for the ISP I was working for at the time, turned very quickly into a serious ‘hobby’.

To start the birthday celebrations, I’m starting a new series ‘Connected Internet Vault’. This comment reminded me of one of my favourite posts which I’d totally forgotten I’d written, and made me realise that a lot of users didn’t even know existed. So, in the Vault series I’m going to trawl though my archives one month at a time to highlight older posts that I think users might still find useful or interesting to read.

March 2005 was a quiet month as most of my posts were test ones that I went back and deleted a few months later when I started to take this blog seriously:

• Broadband Speed Test: I didn’t realise that I wrote this post in my first month. As you can see from my top posts at the top of my sidebar, this post is still one of my most trafficked posts 3 years later! Originally the post linked through to an external speed test, but once I saw how much traffic it was getting I re-wrote the post and purchased a speed test to try to retain more traffic
• 2005 Top Blogs: This was a shameless attempt to create trackbacks on big sites - vital for smaller blogs trying to get indexed. My plan was to do one of these posts every week; I think I gave up on about week 6 as I’d already achieved a PR4
• Online Libel: How To Avoid: Essential reading for all bloggers
• What is Epic: Google To Merge With Amazon?: Great video which analysing the impact of a Google/Amazon merger