Lynn writes:

I checked out some sites and maybe I’m doing this Blogg [sic] all wrong. They have pictures to enhance their stories. Make mine look so welfare. Then again, it’s not about how it looks, it’s the content, right?

Talk about being self righteous and goody, goody two shoes. If the majority of bloggers are so intellectual and experts in their individual fields, what the f**k are they writing in a fricken Blogg [sic]!

Good question, Lynn. Why the f**k am I, a Punahou and Mainland college grad, writing in a f**kin’ blog anyway?

Actually, the story for me goes back a bit. I actually tried out being an online journal back in 1999. My journal was called Tabula Rasa, and the tagline I used was “Every day begins with a clean slate.”

Now, those were the days when keeping a website often meant handcoding a page in HTML in good ol’ Notepad. If you were lucky, you had something like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to help you, but it was still a matter of manually typing something into a page, and uploading it to your server. Applications like Movable Type and WordPress were in their infancy. Plus, my journal resided in my webspace on LavaNet, so I couldn’t have used anything like Movable Type there even if I wanted to.

I kept up my updating there, talking about my life, the universe, and everything, for about three years, but then fell out of the habit. Two things were the nails in TR’s coffin…(1) being laid off in March 2002, and (2) taking my current job at HMSA, where due to confidentiality I’d be very limited in talking about work, where I spend a third of my waking hours.

(One of these days, for archival purposes, I’ll migrate TR into my pineapplejuice.net space.)

But why did I start one in the first place? Well, a big influence for me was Ryan Ozawa’s magnum opus, In Medias Res. I thought it was neat how he could find something to write about…telling his own story, and I tried to do the same thing. Plus, it was a way for me to keep my web design skills in shape, to keep me from forgetting my HTML.

I’m not sure what triggered me to restart blogging/journaling after a long hiatus. Refreshing my Web design skills certainly had much to do with it. In fact, I have a much better understanding of CSS now and how to use it in Web design. But I think I started missing making my opinions known, reacting to the world around me and leaving a mark, however small. (I hardly write about my daily life and the people around me anymore, except in very general terms. Perhaps that might change later though. We shall see.)

I think perhaps Lynn might have happened across sites like IMR, seeing high-tech photo galleries, etc., and wondering why hers doesn’t measure up. Believe me, I’ve done my share of looking at different blogs and journals and wondering how they make them look so good while mine looks so crappy. If I ever put TR on pineapplejuice.net, you’ll see what I mean.

But Lynn is right. It’s all about the content. A blog is made unique by whatever its author has to say. You can try to emulate certain blogs, but ultimately the one you create will become uniquely your own. And you don’t need lots of photos.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2005 at 11:05 pm and is filed under General Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.