My first article in Medium — Thoughts after writing over 10 years in 7 different blogs

Hello, I’m Roni, but people call me Rolle. I have been designing websites and writing almost every day since I was a little boy.

I have been just reading Medium for a while now. I first fell in love with it couple of years back when read about web design and typography. Well, Medium is the place for writing, typography, creativity and design. You can guess where I got my inspiration from when I redesigned my personal website in spring 2014.

Everything in Medium looks awesome and readable. I know for a fact that many web designers get their inspiration from Medium including myself.

Medium is not only well designed platform, it has kind of magic that makes people write great posts and tell great stories.

Besides just designing websites, I have been blogging for over 10 years. Born 1988, I released my first website in 1999 when I was just over 10 years old. Actually, just recently I decided to go and try the old FTP server and for my amusement the credentials still worked, so I created a little info page for the legacy of my first server, which was actually timestamped back to Fri May 07 23:31:18 UTC 1999.

For a long time I had only one blog, Rollemaa.org. The domain was originally rolleweb.net (yeah, rolle + web, what an imagination I had when I was a little boy!), but I lost the domain when the web hosting provider got bankrupt. I mostly ranted about my personal life, obstacles and general IT stuff. Even coding. But after in 10 years of blogging I had over 3000 articles published I realized that blogging without a niche is fun, but not necessarily always the best way to achieve interaction or to make articles useful to others.

I have always watched movies and I have a habit reviewing every single one I see. For years those little reviews were a part of my site, until I separated them to a entirely different page. Suddenly I had two blogs.

Since a little boy I was intrigued by dreaming and wrote a dream journal and after blogging got common I started to write a dream blog. I used to write dreams on paper after waking up and then copy them online. Three blogs.

When I heard I was going to be a father in 2008 I started another blog, centered around waiting my first born child. When she was born in 2009, me and my wife continued writing together about her and our family life. We blogged actively about couple of years, but after I got new job and my wife went to school our life got so busy we only had time for occasional Facebook or Instagram pics about our kids growing up. Besides, I started to think it’s not wise to have all your kids’ stuff posted online — they can decide about their online presence when they are old enough. At least I like to think that, it may be too late already for me being their father. Alas, the blog had to be closed for these reasons.

I have always blogged only for myself and didn’t care if nobody read my articles, but I started to care in some point when I noticed people were actually reading them. I wanted to provide useful information instead for just posting it in a sense of my personal self-therapy. I also wanted some order in my world of blogging which has turned into a quite mess, in a sense of non existent niches.

So I created my first blog in English, Problemsolv.in where I was going to solve information technology related problems.

I use computers and gadgets every day, it’s my life. So of course I run into problems occasionally. I use Mac OS, Linux, Windows and Android, so it’s inevitable. I have my own txt files where I put important stuff and commands I need to remember. I use bash alias with a grep function to filter stuff from the huge database of information I have, about the solved problems during the years. But lately I’ve noticed it’s not enough. I still need to google some problem I have solved years ago and can’t remember it any more. So I figured why not having all the solved problems in the same place? So the problemsolv.in was born!

I was ( and still am) a bit insecure about my writing skills in English and even though my mother thinks I’m good at languages my grades weren’t really great. I’m decent in writing in Finnish, but my Swedish sucks and despite the fact my mother pressured me to study French and Spanish for years, the only language I feel good about is Finnish. When you look at my older texts in foreign languages, I can’t help but place my face on my hands.

I have been using IRC all my life as well and in some point I created a website for my IRC channel (so 90s for IRC channel to have a website, I know). Of course there had to be another blog. I had already lost count on how many blogs I had, but every single blog had a purpose.

In spring 2013 I quit my job and started my own web design agency. About time, since I had been dreaming it before, just had no balls or money to do it. Or no friend to do it with for that matter. Despite being a freelancer throughout my studies I hated working alone. When I met a brilliant graphic designer in my last job I had found the missing piece. Obviously, I had to have a blog for my company website.

After tasting craft beers for five years I wanted to say more about great beers, so I created a beer blog.

Now, just before this article I had been planning on setting up another blog to rolle.io in English, which would be a general blog about my life stories or a web design blog — or both. I have read Martin Wolf’s, Hugo Giraudel’s and Eric Meyer’s blogs for a while (just to name a few) and my blog was going to be similar — web design, but then again just general stuff, in English. Then I remembered Medium, the awesome online magazine I had read for years now — why not to write there?

So, Medium is my eight blog. I have so much stories to tell, tips to share, snippets to code. We’ll see what this leads into.