Unbeknownst to me at the time, January 6th marked my two year blogiversary! Here’s what I had to say a year ago about the matter (no, I didn’t find it that interesting, either).
As I did then, I now think that it’s odd to have so much of my life documented online (or documented at all, actually). I suppose that it’s the nature of our ever-changing society; at least in this, the most first of the First World countries.
Though I’ve had a blog for over two years, I’ve had web pages in general for something like five. My earlier attempts were (gasp) even more awful and unpopular than this one, but hey, whad’yagonnado?
My first page was a particularly good example of bad web design. Interminable scrolling with an unnecessarily busy background. I’m sure you all know the sort, basically a long list of links with witty comments indicating what they were about, pictures of “cool” things like that one of the fighter jet breaking the sound barrier. I think I updated it all of twice and it was seen by my girlfriend at the time, a few of my friends, and, of course, myself some hundreds of times (as if I thought something new was going to happen without my knowing). As I recall, I had found out that I was given some free web space at school, and decided to do something with it. PINE was still the way to do e-mail, Mosaic was still the bomb-diggity, and I was all about *cough* AOL *cough cough*.
After that, I was all about Photoshop and the whole “web portal” concept (see above). Yes, that actually says “Welcome to Dave’s Page!” (shakes head sadly). My “interface” was pretty trick, though (at least I thought so at the time). You rolled over the buttons on the left, and images would appear on the “screen”. I had such interesting pages as “Freaks”, which pretty much had one picture of Phineas Gage, “Portfolio” that was, of course COMING SOON, “The Cosmic Punker” a weekly (read bi-annual) cartoon about a intergalactic space punk, and then the largest section “Aquarium” which was actually a fairly comprehensive section about setting up reef tanks (which I’m into, you see). That baby got all of maybe 15 unique hits.
And then entered Blogger. And it was good. I was actually surprised (and still am) at how faithfully I update(d) my blog, having tried to do handwritten journals on many many occasions, and failing miserably after less than a week. It’s also, somehow, garnered me a certain level of online popularity, but nothing to really crow about… and besides, this is all for my own enjoyment, right?
And so here we are, two years in and hopefully the wiser. It’s been fun, and I expect it to continue to be so for years to come. Thanks for coming, tell your friends, and y’all come back now, hear?