Kevin This is the second installment of my blogging journey, The Blogger’s Highway, where I’ll be talking about my blogging process, other related topics, and in today’s case, my history with blogging.
If you’ve been reading this blog from the start, or if you went down the rabbit hole and read all my posts up until today’s, you’ve probably seen my sojourn in blogging years ago come up a time or two. We’ve all seen at least one blog if we spend enough time online, whether it’s a super-sophisticated one with all the bells and whistles, a paid theme completely customized to the point nobody would ever know its’ original form, free ones on WordPress or Blogspot, or even niche sites with the option to host user-created content (like Caring Bridge).
My first blog was on LiveJournal at the start of my second year of college, when I had regular access to the Internet at the community college library. This was still before the Internet came to my house, which was still a few years away at that time. An old friend of mine from middle school and I reconnected, and she was already on LiveJournal by then. It all seemed so cool to me, someone who had never used the Internet beyond the school library for assignments, and even then, only for like an hour tops.
As a favor to my old friend, I won’t be sharing her real name or any other identifying details out of respect for her. For the sake of the story, I’ll call her Elizabeth. We reconnected just before classes started that year, and since she graduated the year after I did due to extenuating circumstances, she was just starting there.
She had family working at the college at the time, so she got to go for free. Tres lucky!!
Anyhow, Elizabeth turned me on to LiveJournal, which I remembered reading about in Teen Vogue when we were still in high school. I had signed up for my first email account on Yahoo, which is now long gone after an incident with some other people years later.
The handle was pretty fuckin’ stupid anyway.
I signed up for LiveJournal, and I was so impressed at how some of the journals I found looked. Some of them had paid themes, and some had early adopter accounts from like 2001 or whatever.
Elizabeth had a theme centered on her favorite movie at the time, so I did the same after I got bored of the theme it originally assigned me and playing around with the colors. I kept mine on friends only, and over the years, there were others who got added to the list. Some were friends of friends, and others came from the handful of groups I’d joined.
Life took us all in separate directions, and one of them even died years ago.
I still think about them, and I wonder how they’re all holding up these days.
After a while, I basically abandoned my LiveJournal, and forgot all about it. I don’t even remember the account password, and if it’s associated with the Yahoo email address I had at the time, there’s probably no way I’d ever be able to access it anyway.
It’s probably for the best, since there’s some pretty lame and embarrassing stuff in it, haha.
Over the years, I came up with ideas for a blog, and abandoned them. I never actually set up the blogs, but I used to write out posts in their own Word documents, and pretend to myself it was a blog as practice. I’d write little movie reviews from stuff I’d rent from an indie rental shop that’s long since gone out of business.
What a sad day it was when they closed. Seriously. That was one of the places I lived for back in college.
In my pretend blog, which never saw the light of day, I’d write about the movies themselves, and my thoughts on them.
I ran out of steam for it after maybe 50 Word documents’ worth of content. I’m not sure if I even still have any of it, and I’ve forgotten which flash drive I saved them on.
I forgot about the whole blog idea, and resigned myself to the self-belief (lolz) that it’s all been said and done before anyway.
What was the point of even trying? Everyone else who had blogs at that time were out there killing it right and left, and they could say it all a zillion times better than I ever could.
I used to feel like the only way for me to be good enough to even consider blogging, I’d need to do a bunch of stuff and learn a ton of new skills, so this way, I’d have stuff to talk about and write about.
And of course, a dozen different college degrees would sure as shyt help.
Those ideas stuck with me for the longest time, even as I started losing the weight this time around. I mentioned before that I had no plans to share this with anyone beyond a notebook and whoever I showed it to.
But then when I got an account on Facebook, I found a blogging group. I was in the stage of talking about it, and flirting with the idea once again.
The admin of the group told me to start, ASAP. I felt like maybe this was a sign from the universe. Since money was tight (and still is) for me, I signed up for the free WordPress platform.
I was only there for a week, before I got the money to go self-hosted.
Once I went self-hosted, I shut the free WordPress blog down. It’s in the Google graveyard at this point, but I’m keeping it as a reminder of where I started.
It’s been history ever since, and we’ve still got a month before the year of hosting is over. Hopefully I’ll get enough to pay for another year.
Over to you, readers. Do you have a blog? If so, what’s your journey been like? Is there anything you’d like me to share about my own? Drop it like it’s hot below, and let’s talk.
