Adventures in blogging

A Holidailies prompt from a couple weeks ago asked how each person got his/her start in blogging online. I'm pretty sure I told this story a couple years ago, but it's lost somewhere in the Diaryland backup of my defunct Diary-X journal...

I opened my first online blog account in 1999 on Diaryland. It was just before the turn of the new year, and like everyone else hyped up about the year 2000, I figured I'd start being good about keeping a record of my life for absolutely no reason other than to write. Three days later, I forgot about it. It sat there until I discovered it about three years later.

In the meantime, I began using a paper journal in late 2000 to vent some frustrations I was having with a friend. I found, however, that my brain was trying to rush through a lot more than my hands could keep up with... so I decided to try my computer. If I recall, I was looking for some downloadable software to make it feel more like a book as I typed on-screen. Somehow, I was led to Diary-X. I opened an account immediately and began my online journal on March 29, 2001.

In 2002, I decided to start a backup mirror of my journal on Diaryland (when I discovered my original account over there) based upon a bad experience with the owner of Diary-X on another website he was running called Nervousness.org. From that point forward, I kept an updated mirror of my journal running on both sites-- and thankfully because I did that, I didn't lose anything but unpublished drafts during the fatal Diary-X crash in early 2006.

Despite griping about it and its elitism invite-only format at the time, I gave in and joined Livejournal after attending Arisia in 2003, mostly to keep up wtih many of my friends who used the service. I never really cared for the layout of the site. The most valuable part of it to me was the friends' lists. But it was handy.

And suddenly, I was posting to three accounts at a time, which was stupid. After a few months, it was time to pare down.

Starting in 2005, I started posting at my own webspace, using Blogger as the formatting engine. Issues with both owners of Diary-X had led me to move on from the forms two months prior, and I couldn't continue to use the service in good faith due to the ethics and behavior I experienced as a customer(which turned out to be a very good choice, based on what ultimately happened to DX). With few exceptions, I've also stopped posting on LiveJournal, only popping in to catch up on friends' pages from time to time.

I kept my archive at Diaryland, although I haven't posted to the site since I stopped posting at Diary-X. It remains my journal archive for my older entries. I plan to slowly bring everything over to my personal webspace... but it takes time to go through entries, delete dead links, and add tags to the posts for archiving. It's definitely an "as I have time for it" project, which lately has been mostly non-existent.

Over the years, my blogging has recorded my entire relationship with my fiance, the adoption of four cats, two apartment moves, purchasing my first home, buying my first car, my experiences on 9/11, a big job move, and all of the little stuff in-between. It transitions between triteness and deep thought, almost always written freeform with little editing (I prefer "raw" writing). I can see how I've changed and how I've stayed the same as I look back through my archives. It's a good thing-- I'm glad I found the outlet online. :)