How did I get started blogging and why? And why do I continue to periodically ‘shout into the endless void’ that modern blogging seems to have become?
I suppose it started out of a sort of arrogance. I have thoughts and ideas that I sometimes believe others might like to hear. There is also a more generous aspect of my reasoning that imagines my experiences might help someone else in some way.
This post assembles a bit of my blogging history and includes my attempt to explain what drives me to share my weird thoughts on the internet.
The Geocities era
I created my first personal website in the deep, dark vault of the Internet’s earliest days. It was on a service called “Geocities” that was eventually purchased by Yahoo in 1999. I was in my mid-30’s at the time.
My Geocities URL was: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Crater/3106/. That URL won’t work any longer as Yahoo deleted all the Geocities content sometime in 2009. The Wayback machine has a rough copy from 1999 that can be viewed if you like.
I’m not sure I would call this a ‘blog’, but I did create HTML pages fairly frequently. If I recall correctly I was using Microsoft Frontpage as my HTML editor/IDE. It created some of the ugliest HTML in human history, but it was easy to use and not terribly expensive.
I created content related to my EverQuest and table-top D&D gaming as well as our animals.
My first blog
I graduated to my own domain (kgadams.net) and using a content management system (CMS) called PHP-Nuke sometime around 2003 or thereabouts. I also used PHP-Nuke for managing several MMOG guild sites: it had a forum feature that was useful for this. The whole configuration was hosted on a personal computer in my attic that I kept running with various distributions of Linux.
PHP-Nuke worked well enough back in the day, but I never really got very serious about blog posting with it. And Nuke became more and more ‘flakey’ and insecure as the years progressed. I wanted something better and more elegant to encourage me to post more frequently, something that didn’t get in my way like PHP-Nuke did, so I migrated to WordPress.
The ‘real’ Kelly’s World blog
My cut-over to WordPress in 2005 was rather abrupt. I tried to migrate most of my old content from PHP-Nuke, but that migration wasn’t completed very well. I eventually cleaned up the ‘broken’ posts I had migrated over a decade later.
As the years went by I refined my ‘self-hosting’ solution. After moving to Castlegar I assembled a reasonably robust firewall using pfSense and built both that and my web server itself using ‘NUC‘ (Next Unit of Computing) type micro PCs. These are installed somewhat neatly in a wall mounted rack system in the basement of our house.
In addition to my ‘self-hosted’ gear I also use CloudFlare as a CDN and security ‘front end’ for my site. This makes my site a bit more resilient in the face of the never-ending deluge of bot farms and hackers out there, and also helps to improve performance.
Most recently I relocated my motorcycle related blog content onto a separate URL: Geek on a Harley. This is intended to make it easier for people with specific interests to find the content that appeals to them. I plan on doing much the same at a later date with my gaming related content.
Why do I blog
I mentioned in the introduction that I suspect at least part of my reason for blogging stems from a bit of arrogance on my part. I sometimes rather foolishly believe that my thoughts and the way I arrive at them should be interesting to other people. I imagine that I’m pretty smart, and would like to win the admiration and respect of my readers.
But I’m also an introvert who is hyper-critical of my own thoughts and writing. Imposter syndrome is my daily companion as is chronic depression. This often prevents me from posting to my blog for months on end.
I also like to blog on the theory that some of the things I’ve observed, experiences I’ve had, or problems I’ve solved might help someone else going through something similar. My life is fairly normal: I just think about it a lot, and perhaps that extra thinking can benefit someone else instead of just leading to near endless anxiety for myself.
I believe that latter reasoning is possibly the ‘best’ reason for blogging. If we all share our experiences and the deeper thoughts we have, then we can possibly help others in their own lives. Writing is also cathartic for me. Putting my thoughts and feelings into a blog post helps me make sense of what is going on inside my head. So in that sense, I blog to help myself.
Unfortunately, I have also found that blogging in recent years has been decimated by social media. In simple terms, vanishingly few people read my blog posts any more. I feel like I am posting in a vacuum created by all the interest being drawn to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Search engines are optimized to direct people to the most popular sources of information, and more often than not that is Facebook, Twitter(X), or a large media site. My blog posts almost never appear in search results.
I’m trying to overcome this negative sense of being unheard. Do I really need to be heard to enjoy the process of blogging? Well, a bit I suppose: but maybe it is more important to just add my thoughts to the vast churn that is the modern internet. Sometimes yelling into the endless void is therapeutic.
As much as I love the boost in interaction that comes with every Blaugust, I have realized that I am also perfectly content chatting away to the void. Longform writing (well, writing longer than a social media post or Discord message) is a skill, and every time I stop using that skill for any significant period, it atrophies. Now, I’m not saying I have any plans to ever go back to fiction writing, but I feel like there are many worse ways I could (and do, unfortunately) spend my time than dedicating a few hours a week to keeping myself sharp, as it were.
It also lets me dabble in media reviews (which has always interested me, but was never anything that occurred to me to pursue as a career), and gives me an outlet for the fun projects and personal challenges that I set up for myself for a completely artificial feeling of accomplishment when I do them.
I have nothing but respect for the folks who put active effort into increasing their readership and into driving engagement, but that’s not me at all, and because I definitely do not want to do those things, well, I have accepted that I will put posts into the world that absolutely no one will read. I did struggle with that for a bit, but eventually, I settled into the idea of I wrote them because I wanted to, not because I needed anyone else’s validation.
“I settled into the idea of I wrote them because I wanted to, not because I needed anyone else’s validation.”
I’m only about 70% of the way to your level of wisdom on this, Krikket 😉
I mostly write for myself. Sometimes it is cathartic, often it helps me organize my own messy thoughts, but mostly it simply feels some variation of ‘good’. But about a third of my thinking about blogging gets occupied by the idea of making my ideas ‘public’, which I am sad to say includes a desire for a bit of validation.
This leads me to look at reader stats, and invest time in figuring out things I can do to make my content more ‘visible’ to the world at large. I search for keywords from my blogs on Google periodically, and sometimes this leads me to make some changes. It isn’t the majority of what motivates me but it is a part of it, for good or bad.
Yes, Kelly, you are blogging into a vacuum but I am there with you. (And suspect, so are many of your friends.)
I’ve been reading your recent blog posts with fascination and with gratitude — you are brave to share some of your most sensitive stories with us. I too have self-doubts, stemming from a personal realization that I often act before thinking it through, so I can relate to some of your internal struggles. Reading about how you also have such struggles and have obviously stayed functional despite them gives me inspiration to preserve in my struggles as well.
Thanks, Ernie! I’m glad to have you here.
I’m prone to ‘over-sharing’ in my blogs and in my conversations with people. I don’t really know why, but it is part of who I am. I also do a tremendous amount of over-thinking: both before and after I do or say something. Sometimes the blog is an aid to working through or formalizing that thinking and sort of ‘putting it to bed’ so I can move on to other things.
If my blogging and conversational excess helps anyone else in any practical way, then maybe that is a net good? That’s hard to judge, I guess 🙂