Why I blog

Well. It’s 10:30 on Friday and I am woefully, woefully late to Joy’s blog party about blogging! I got so immersed in NSD stuff today, and a bit of writing, that I completely, utterly forgot to post this!! But better late than never, I suppose…so here’s my take.

I started blogging back in…er…2000? 1999? Can’t quite remember. It was way before anyone really knew what a “blog” was. I’d had my own website since 1997, going through all sorts of designs & design trends. Back then it was fun to make little graphics and try to drum up content to go with all the pretty images…I remember that a long-distance friend and I would go see a movie on the same day and record our impressions (“Brian and Sara go to the movies…2,000 miles apart” was the title, I think, haha). Then this new program/site came along, Blogger, and all of a sudden designers had content! Daily content if wanted!

It took some time to play with this “blogging” thing and decide what it was good for. After the first few months of novelty, it almost seemed pointless. Who cares what I’m doing with my days? I then blogged in fits and starts, not really posting anything of substance. I’d stop for months at a time.

Then “suddenly” blogging was the It thing. Everyone was doing it, people began referring to the “blogosphere” and blogger’s voices were being heard & heeded. I remember thinking, huh? When did blogging become something people did? Heh.

I kept my blog going over the years, switching back and forth from one program to another, which is why right now my archives only go back to 2005 or so. I’ve got most of my posts all the way back, but they’re in a form that WordPress can’t import, so until I have time to convert them all, they stay hidden away.

When I look at those old entries, I realize that the value of those posts are in their value to me. It doesn’t matter if anyone ever reads them—I have them, and they have become the journal I never kept in real life. A digital scrapbook. I read some of those old posts and remember things I would have forgotten, and I realize how glad I am to have them.

While this year I’m trying to reach out into the blogging world and make new friends, this little website, and all its content and quirks and goofiness, is my little playground and journal and “room of my own.” It’s here for me, to record things and play with new ideas and maybe even make some new friends. It’s a creative outlet, from digging into code and creating new site designs to being a portal to find art inspiration to being a place for me to show off my own creations. But when it’s all said and done, decades from now I will have a great treasure trove of memories to flip through, a path back through the past full of images of the person I was and through all my becomings. And that is priceless.