The weblog, or blog, is at least 20 years old. Its rise to power occurred during the middle aughts of the 21st century, and depending on who’s running a blog, it’s been a force to be reckoned with ever since. I’ve been riding the coat tails of this phenomenon the whole time.

My personal experience with blogging goes back quite a ways, starting with a personal website on GeoCities towards the end of the 1990s. I started to write posts on a semi-regular basis, usually one/month. I considered myself more a web developer than a blogger because of all I had to do.

“Back in the day” if you wanted to publish on the web you did everything yourself, starting with the HTML layout of the page. I used Macromedia’s Dreamweaver WYSIWYG editor all during this period, later abandoning it when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005. After that I used emacs and constantly checked my layout by rendering it in a browser, first in Internet Explorer, later in Firefox. It was around that time that I also got a free Blogger account, the minimal version, before it was acquired by Google. Blogger had something I thought was revolutionary, a browser-based editor, and it supplied all the HTML framework. All I had to do was type in content. It was also during this same period that Yahoo was ruining GeoCities, the prime reason I was driven to Blogger.

I consider WordPress my third general web home after GeoCities and Blogger. I love the web interface and all it can do, considering it far more powerful than Google’s Blogger. Google has let Blogger go to seed; little has changed over the eleven years I’ve been involved with Blogger. Coming over to WordPress was exhilarating compared to Blogger. I’m glad I moved.

Because it’s now so easy to write and publish with WordPress (compared to everything I’ve experienced) I’ve begun to think more and more about writing. I’d love to write far more than I do. So many ideas keep “blinking on” in my mind, but I have so much to do with my regular life that when I do have time to write I’ve lost those trains of thought. It happened to me a lot last year. This year, as an informal new year’s resolution, I’ve decided to write whenever I can, as often as I can. You’ll thus see a spurt of two or three or even more posts/day, usually on a weekend, followed by periods of dormancy, usually during a week day. That’s my life and I’m writing around it.

I like to write. I want to write. I need to write to keep my limited writing skills polished, and if at all possible, develop them even farther. I make no apologies about “serial blogging.” I read that phrase on another blog used to castigate that author because he dared to write more than one post/day. I will write when the thoughts are hot, even when they’re not. Nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to read what I write.

With that thought in mind I’d like to thank everyone who has decided to follow my blog. You give me something very precious, a sense of community far stronger than anything I ever felt back on Blogger. I value each and every one of you. You all motivate me to not just write, but to strive to write well. Thank you, my WordPress friends.