For me, the key to blogging is simply this: you have to like writing. You need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not. A blog, for me, is simply a place to put what I write with the added advantage of thinking of it as "published," even if for all practical purposes few, if any, people will actually see and read it. Put another way, a blog is not an end, though it has the illusion of being that. The writing is the end.
I don't know when I started blogging. I have no remembered date so I can't really do anniversary posts. Even if I did have the date I started I wouldn't do anniversary posts simply because I would never remember to do them. According to my archives, my first post here, on Writelife, was May 16, 2004. It's a boring post, that first one, a redirect of sorts and refers vaguely to my interest in movies. Yawn.
Writelife was not my first blog. My first, and still alive and well blog, was Piddleville. Today it's about movies, that interest I alluded to in my first Writelife post. Here's the thing: according to the Piddleville archives my first post was in December, 2001 - and it's actually pretty funny. You'll notice that it is on Blogger and is called The Burble. That was an earlier manifestation of my blogging. My blogging from the past is quite a muddle because I was trying new things - blogs, types of blogs, domains and so on, learning as I went along. I'm more coherent now, though still a bit muddled.
Here's how all my muddle came about: the truth is, I was blogging before there were blogs. Those posts, however, are not archived on any blog, largely because there were no blogs around when they were created. So when they were written and put online is unknown.
Back then, I would write something, turn it into a page with very basic HTML coding and upload it to my site, which was Piddleville (piddleville.com). The site was a site, not a blog (as we think of them now), and it was a pretty basic site - a good deal of text, some images and simple HTML.
When blogs came about, or at least when Blogger came about and gained some traction, I kept my site but began using Blogger for posts. And I think I linked them back and forth. (Things began to get muddled around this time.)
It doesn't really matter. The point is simply that I don't know when I started blogging, in the sense that I think of blogging. Blogging, as I define it, is simply writing something and putting it online. To be more specific, you could say "putting it online using self-publishing tools." Or something like that. But to me the writing is the important part of the definition, not the tool.
One day, I should really go over my own online history. It would certainly be of interest to me. For one thing, Piddleville has had a number of manifestations over the years. I feel a bit sentimental about the first one, the original Piddleville. It was not a site or blog as we think of them today.
It was fiction. It was a kind of local news site for a town (Piddleville) that existed only in my head. And if I may be a little self-inflated, it was damned funny! There was a very proper, schoolmarm like character named Henta McKlosky who was running for town council. And there was a somewhat sleazy, Rodney Dangerfield like guy named Dick Whizzy - "The Whizzer!" He was running for the same spot on town council. Henta wanted to advance the interests of public schools in Piddleville; Dick wanted to play fast-and-loose with funding to pay for a brothel he wanted to open, the Havana Hubba-Hubba Hotel.
There was Barclay, the self-important movie and social critic. And there was Billy Smalls, a little kid who seemed to live only for getting into trouble by creating embarrassing situations for people in the town. And on and on. Believe me, I had fun doing it.
Eventually it evolved and had various other manifestations until I reached a point where the unfocused nature of what I was doing online was getting out of hand. So Piddleville became my blog/site for my interest in movies and I created Writelife for my interest in writing, technology, social media and so on. I imposed some focus.
All the above tangent is really just to reinforce what I wrote initially - you need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not.
So I blog because I write. It doesn't work the other way around, at least not for me.
(This post was prompted after reading Mark Dykeman's post, Things I've learned after two years of blogging.)
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