This past Saturday was my third blogiversary! I thought I would use this opportunity to answer a question I got from a few people during my reader survey from last fall.
There’s a short answer, and a longer answer, so I thought this blog’s origin story deserved explaining in a post of its own.
I started this blog on a whim. It was early January 2010. My daughter was about eight months old, and I was beginning to have more free time available. So like many, I started a blog to fill those small bits of time when she was napping. I thought it would be a fun way to show family and friends all the projects I did around the house, but soon found that it was a great way to keep myself motivated to create and accomplish more.
Although I started this blog just three short years ago, I feel like that’s not the real beginning of the story.
I have always been an artist, a creator, a writer, a publisher. That sounds a little weird to have always been a publisher, but it’s true. I was making books at a very young age. I still remember one I made out of a cardboard soda crate and poster paint called “I love mom.” It’s probably long gone by now, but it’s so representative of what I still do today: making something out of nothing.
I was an art student in high school and college. Sometimes I wish I had pursued that as a career. I wasn’t discouraged from it, but sometimes I’m too practical for my own good. (Side example: I even talked myself out of an engagement ring, because in the end, the money was “ours” anyway. What was I thinking?)
In college, after bouncing around a couple of majors, I ended up majoring in journalism and worked on an independent, completely student-run newspaper. We put that thing together from scratch every two weeks, got it printed it up at a real newspaper press and distributed it all over campus.
Sometime in 1998 (still in college), I started a fan website for a rock band from the UK. It sounds a bit pretentious to say you’ve probably never heard of them, but… you’ve probably never heard of them. At the time, it was the only site for the band in the US. It was on geocities (who’s old enough to remember geocities?), and had some crazy-long URL that had nothing to do with the name of the site. Seems strange now, but the internet was in such early stages at that point.
Now I wish I could see how many pageviews I was getting. I remember getting hits and e-mails from all over the world, but the internet and I were too young to care about stats.
I was stunned to find the site on the Wayback Machine a couple of months ago, and it was so funny to get that glimpse back into my late teens/early twenties. (Oh, and there’s no way I’m sharing the link with you all. Too embarrassing!)
I ended the site in 2001, and I continued to design personal websites for friends and myself here and there throughout the years. My first full-time job also included a lot of HTML coding, and professional work sort of took the place of the personal. Looking back, I wish I would have stuck with some sort of site through the 2000s because that’s when blogs really took off. Sometimes I feel like I missed the boat. But better late than never, right?
So that’s more than you ever probably wanted to know about my history. Was anyone else out there site building at the dawn of the internet?
