What blogging has meant to me

It’s the 20th anniversary of Dave Winer’s proto-blog (the email list that would eventually become what would eventually be called a blog), and this has made me reflect on what blogging has meant to me.

I’ve been blogging, on and off, in one form or another, for almost 15 years. I started on Diaryland in early 2000, at age 19, because a girl I had a crush on used it. Around the same time, several of my friends started, and it seemed like a fun thing to do. I wrote a couple of really terrible and probably totally insecure PHP scripts to bang on a MySQL database and started writing on the web.

It’s basically continued like that since (sans the shitty code part — I leave that to people who know what they’re doing and publish via static website generator these days).

The thing that I’ve struggled with is continuity. I’ve started, stopped, and destroyed more blogs than I can count. For a long time I didn’t understand why I did this — it was a compulsion, and (I feared) a reflection of some deep-seated psychological issue — but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned a lot more about myself, and now I understand.

See, I blog for me, not for you. Sorry. I need to do this because I don’t organize my thoughts very well otherwise. So I write. And just as I don’t operate well when I’m stuck at a desk all day, I get bored with the surroundings (any specific blog) and I tear it all down and start again. Some men just want to watch [their blog] burn, ya know?

So, for me, blogging has meant that I have an outlet for my own thinking, one that both allows me to organize those thoughts and receive occassional feedback on them. I could have built … something? … had I been more consistent and written in a fixed location for all of these years, but I’m pretty OK with how it has all turned out.

Thank you for reading. :-)

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