Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Why This Blog (Part 1)

Many events led up to my starting this blog.

Journal writing is in my blood. My first handwritten journal entry appeared when I was in the seventh grade. How long ago was that? I just did the math in my head. It can't have been that long. Thirty years?

My first attempt at putting my journal on a computer failed almost immediately. It was back in the mid 1980's, before we even had personal computers in my department at work. The popular home computer at the time was the Commodore 64. And that's what I bought. The word processor it ran could display only half a screen at a time, 40 of 80 characters. Switching from the left of the page to right wore me out very quickly.

What I really wanted to do was write sections of text and then link to them from other sections of text. I hadn't heard of HTML yet. But if I did I would have wanted to use it.

Another ten years went by. And then my employer's LAN became established, and we had dial-up Internet access. If you think 56K is slow, imagine 56K shared among ten people. Despite the slow access, I established my first web page. A lame first attempt, it merely consisted of a list of links.

It wasn't that I couldn't think of content. Rather, I couldn't think of a way to bare my soul and remain anonymous. (As soon as I finished it, I sent an announcement to everyone.) So I let it collect virtual dust.

As our daughter started to grow and do interesting things, I became more interested than ever in journaling. I committed myself to writing it on computer. This time I had HTML to work with, and a wonderful text editor that understood HTML syntax.

3 comments:

Tirsden Frozenrayn said...

Part 2! Part 2! Err, I mean, yeah I have kept journals over the years but for a long time it was only because Mom forced me and my brother to do them on trips. Eventually I got into diary writing, but that became sporadic, then died out completely, and yet has been semi-recently reborn in a new book that doesn't get written in much. D'oh!

The day before I left my soon-to-be-Ex was when I started my LiveJournal. And I haven't stopped posting since. It's my rant board. It's my shoulder to cry on. It's my way of expressing myself in a way I can't seem to do in "real life."

BLOG ON!

Author said...

Part 2...

That depends on whether Blogspot can stay alive long enough for me to post. It also depends on how long my eyes stay open.

It's cool that you registered here. But I'll keep posting at your LJ site, since that's your main place.

Tirsden Frozenrayn said...

Yeah, actually I did decide to do a photoblog here, so it's all good. And I see what you mean about Blogspot vanishing into the lost land of 404 Page Not Found. Or whatever the Internet Explorer equivalent of that is now... x_X