A Decade of Craziness

Wow, ten years, can you believe it?  Today is the 10th anniversary of my first blog post.  Back then, the blog was called “Why You Think I’m Weird, Stories from My Childhood” and was hosted on LiveJournal.  Remember LiveJournal? 

My very first post was called “Wormhole,” and like many of my early posts, it was quite short.  When I began the blog, I was really just transferring mediums.  My posts were things I used to leave in my AIM status update box; fun little stories about when I was a kid.  (Apparently both AIM and LiveJournal are still out there.)

As I explored this new medium, my posts slowly grew in length, but the topics mostly stayed the same: fun stories from when I was kid.   More current fun stories started to get mixed in – though honestly, for many of my adventures, if I don’t tell you how old we were, we could have been 10 or 30.  And then I went to Zambia.

For two years, my posts were sparse as I dealt with infrequent access to shaky internet connections.  I remember sitting in the small internet café in Monze, typing for an hour only to have my post lost when the internet connection went down; Monze, and Kitwe and Choma, it happened everywhere.  I’d give up and wind up posting just a short note, like this.

I wrote for a bit when I returned from Zambia.  Then, there was a long break.  Life gets in the way like that sometimes.  When I picked up blogging again in law school, there was a definite shift to the present.  After a few months, I moved the blog to Blogger and switched the title to better reflect the content.  Since then, it’s been a mix of all sorts of things.  I think the stories from growing up are still my favorites, though.

Blogging’s changed a lot over the past decade.  The original LiveJournal  community was all people I knew, either my family members or friends from from college.  The nature of my posts really reflected that.

In 2008 and 2009, blogging felt to me like it was in it’s heyday.  I had readers from all over the place and the community around my blog was made up of both people I knew well from life and people I only knew from their own blogs and our comments with each other.  In many ways, I think Twitter played a big role in the demise of that part of my blogging community.  Twitter also had a big effect on my own blogging.  It gave me a different outlet; one that required far less thinking than a full blog post needs.

I’m not sure what the future of blogging will look like.  It often seems outdated to me know with the massive amounts of news sites and things like Pintrest, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.  But I’m glad my blog’s still here and I’m glad I have a place to keep writing.  Thanks for keeping reading.

 

Interesting Blog Stats

Most-visited post of all time, The Legend in his Rick Ross Halloween costume. with over 2300 views since it was posted in 2009.  (The second-most popular post only has just under 800 views, by comparison.): Hallo Weeeeee Een

Total posts to-date: 622

Most common tags: picture, Cali and Zambia