Why do you blog? This is a question that comes up time and time again from people so I thought I’d set the record straight.
First off, when I started nerdgirl.com – back in 1997 – there was no such thing as “blogging”. In fact, I am old school and really don’t like the term blog because it sounds so web 2.0. I used to just call it “my site”. And my site consisted of crap that was important or not so important to me.
I once was given a business card of a person that had the worst tagline on it known to mankind.
“I’ve been spinning house since before house was house.”
Seriously. That is the tagline of a person who has just smoked a giant doobie of some Northern California skunk, had an epiphany and thought that it was so brilliant that he had to actually print it onto his business card to share with the world. An experience similar to when Doc fell and hit his head on the toilet in Back to the Future and invented the flux capacitor…
But I guess that is what I’m saying now (sans the mary jane or the time travelling Delorean).
“I’ve been blogging since before blogging was blogging.”
Secondly, people seem really weirded out that I share so much personal information (in terms of thoughts and activities) on this site. But that is also not entirely true. If you know me on a day to day basis and are called my friend then you know most of what I post on here leaves out about 95% of the good stuff. I try to keep it light. I don’t delve into my relationships or examine too many feelings here. I realise that there are points that you can take a barometric reading of the general state of my emotions, but you will hardly get an accurate view of what is going on in my heart.
The reason that I started nerdgirl.com back in the days was because I wanted to learn HTML (yes, the old fashioned handcoding pre-WYSIWG software days). I had nothing to create a website about except the thing I know best – myself. So I sat there with my Compuserve connection and 14.4k modem and uploaded to my shared webspace that I had to rent for about $20 a month for 5MB. And that site was awesome. Complete with embedded midi files of the Muppet Show, blink tags and animated gifs. It was called Stephanie’s Spot.
Over the course of time (as blink tags have died and technology has progressed) nerdgirl.com has evolved from a geeky learning experience into a postcard to my friends and family that are sprinkled across the world. It certainly is more efficient than having to write hundreds of emails to keep in touch with people. At any given time folks can log in and find out what’s up with me.
And there is something quite nice about being able to go through the archives (which have only been saved since 2001 due to the fact that there wasn’t a database backend before) and seeing what I was up to 5 years ago this week.
