I realized the other day that I have been online “blogging” for over ten years now. I remember the first time I heard of it. I was hanging out online at a writers forum called “Forward Motion“. Most folks back then were using LiveJournal or one of the others. I poked around with all of that for a short while but didn’t like being locked in to a box that wasn’t mine or mine to control.
So I learned html and tables and made my own dang box! It was ugly but it worked for me. I had my own website anyway by then (good ol’ holyroller.org) and I just put it there. I eventually learned a little bit of CSS and used that as the basic template. After several years of that (yes, years), I stumbled across WordPress with my web host and switched to that. Open source? Done! Copy/paste-ing all that stuff was a major PITA but I did it. Nearly all of it is here. Somewhere in all my files is the original html files. I shudder to look at the mess it was. I think I may be missing some here and there. December of ’03 starts rather abrupt. There’s got to be some missing.
Most of what I wrote in this blog thing was for myself. Noting down progress or the lack thereof. Being accountable to my invisible minions. I don’t think anyone but me was reading it. They told me it was a web log, shortened down to the word “blog”. So, that’s what I made it. A log. Part diary, part daily log.