20 years of blogging
Dumping my burblings onto the world at large for two decades. No, *you* feel old
Hello!
Today marks the 20th anniversary of my very first blog post. I present it here, for posterity.
What a start, eh? Not quite ‘Hello world’ (though that might have been in the original draft), but close. Hopefully, the writing has improved.
I posted a LOT on Livejournal over the years and still have an account on there as I was kindly gifted a permanent account by a friend. I wrote somewhere in the region of ten thousand blog posts, and had well over 60 thousand comments, and then it just sort of died off, as these things do. I miss the sense of community there.
(Remember that this is in the days before Facebook or Twitter (omg) so the opportunities to dump one’s burblings were a little more limited)
I’m not entirely sure of the moment when LJ stopped being a key part of my online life, but I joined FB sometime in 2007 and Twitter later that year, which almost certainly had something to do with it. All of a sudden people had these other places to post photos of their cats or what they had for breakfast, and they didn’t require as much geekery as some of the early blogs.
I set up espressococo.com in 2009 and have owned dakegra.com (snappy title, eh?) in various guises for a long time before that.
Oh, and I had a short-lived other other blog called Letter Twenty It’s all about the tea, you see? I crack me up. There was a brief dalliance with an allotmenteering blog (The Great Vegetable Plot) and one about poker (Cracked Jacks - now that was fun while it lasted!)
Yeah, I’ve been around for a while.
I've made a lot of friends from blogging over the years, and it makes me a little sad to think that I might never actually meet most of them in person. A while back I sent out a small Moleskine notebook on a trip around the world and my LJ friends - one person would get it, write something (anything) in there, then when they were done we'd look for a couple of volunteers, and send it on its way again. I got it back a few years ago and it's full (well, half-full) of wonderful things, memories and thoughts, and general musings from people I know but might never meet. It even got as far as the White House, just after Obama's inauguration!
I’ve also discovered that people really like an A-Z post, even when it’s about bookblogging, and especially when it’s about movies
I love the process of writing and coming up with stuff. I found this with photography, noticing the little things which others might have missed. It's great fun writing a post and setting it loose, generating conversations with new people, and learning new stuff.
Least favourite part of blogging? Spending ages crafting a lovely blog post and watching as it gets no comments, no mentions, nothing on Twitter. Wondering if it was as interesting written down as it was to me in my head...
The current state of the blog(s)
espresso coco
This is my bookish blog. Do you like books? This is probably the place for you then. I also talk about movies a bit. And other stuff. The name? That came to me in a dream where I’d opened a coffee shop. I really like coffee as well as books.
dakegra
My non-bookish blog, where I talk about all the stuff which isn’t books. Though sometimes I also talk about books. I really like books.
a shot of espresso coco
My semi-frequent email newsletter thing [YOU ARE HERE] in which I talk about the random stuff going on. And my cats. And, somewhat predictably, books.
Oh and there’s my Instagram, where I take photos of stuff. Mainly my cats. YES AND BOOKS OK I LIKE BOOKS.
I’m @dakegra on Twitter. I might talk about books there too. You have been warned.
So, happy blogging anniversary to me. My blog is nearly old enough to buy beer in the US. I might raise a glass of whisky to it later this evening.
Hmmm, a whisky blog. Now there’s an idea…
LunaCat is, naturally, unimpressed.
Sláinte and smooches. Here’s to another twenty years!
D x