In 2000/2001 (I don’t remember the exact date, but the first snapshot that I can find on archive.org is 17th May 2001 – I know I had it for like a year before that though!), I bought a domain via a friend and started what we now know as a blog. Back then? I can’t even remember how it was referred to, but I would write about what happened at sixth form, and had individual pages with photos of friends on that I could link to when I mentioned them in a post – because it wasn’t like I could just link to their blog or Twitter account, because no one had them!
I choose 25th April 2001 as my blogging birthday because that’s when I started my Livejournal. Livejournal, for those of you who aren’t a 30-odd year old girl reading this, was a free blogging platform where you could write posts and have people leave comments that you could reply to and join communities about things you loved. These things seem like the most basic activities to us now, but this is back in the days when Blogger didn’t even have comments built in. We coded our sites by hand in Notepad, looking at other sites code to see how they did this thing and tweaked it to suit our style. (Back when I was in sixth form and had free periods, I would draw and write out what I wanted my site to look like because I couldn’t get onto a computer!)
That’s why I find it so funny when people lamenting about how blogging just isn’t the same, you guyssss as it was back in the day – because that’s how I was feeling when they were all starting out!
Blogging for me has always been a place to babble about what’s going on – from 17 year old me talking about boys, through to my uni life (and talking about boys), and, well, whatever. There were the times that I wanted to be one of the cam girls (Before they became all nudey and had paid for members only sites) and when I wrote lots of posts with affiliate links in which earned me a nice bit of pocket money, but didn’t feel very me.
Blogging in the future for me will be much of the same – I like what I do and I do this for fun. It’s why I’ve not really pushed the monetisation thing on here because it turned something fun into a chore.
Here’s to much more babble!