I’ve been thinking about this after Alex asked himself and blogged about the “Blog Question Challenge”:
- Why did you start blogging in the first place?
- What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
- Have you blogged on other platforms before?
- What’s your favourite post on your blog?
- Any future plans for the blog?
I found interesting Alex’s answers because my first blog, that I closed in 2021 after 18 years, also didn’t start as a blog.
Back in 2003 I had a home server –my old Pentium 100Mhz initially– and I was part of a project to build a metropolitan area network using a wireless –I still have a presentation in PDF about the project; in Spanish–. My server was connected to a nearby elxwifi node (that’s how we called our network), and I offered some services. That included a website in which I shared news about my server and the project, in reverse chronological order –newer entries first–. I had no idea that it was a blog, but that was what started it all for me.
At some point the web was also available via the Internet, which meant a bit more attention than the handful of visits I would get via the wireless network, and because I was learning a lot of new things about open source and Linux, I started to write about that in my page. Then you read other blogs, start commenting on those, and the authors of those blogs comment on yours, and you build a small community. A social network if you will. We called it blogosphere.
I met a lot of interesting people thanks to my blog. Some of them even in person –there were meet ups called Beers and Blogs, for example–, with friendships that last more than 20 years now.
Because my initial approach was homebrew, I ended writing my own blogging software in PHP with MySQL as database to store the posts. I rewrote that a few years later in Python (with Redis to store the posts; during the NoSQL hype), because I was learning that language and that’s what you used to do back then. Today I don’t need any dynamic parts, so I’m using Hugo to manage this blog as a static site.
I don’t think I have a favourite post, but the last post in my old blog was emotive to write. Not every day you decide to end something that has been with you for so long.
I’m not sure what are my plans for this blog. I started trying to replace other social media –Twitter back then–, so I used it to write updates about game development and my projects, and I still do that; but in my experience, thematic blogs are very hard to keep in focus and they turn a bit personal blogs at the end. So I may write about anything I find interesting and I feel like sharing.
I guess I would like to go back to that version of the Internet, that includes writing a blog and participating in memes like this one! So I’m going to tag Oscar, that was one of those bloggers that started blogging by the time I started, and I’m interested in his answers to this challenge.