Recently, it struck me that 2017 marks 20 years I’ve been blogging. I’ve written about those olden times here before. I started my first website in 1997. I used a pseudonym. There were rotating ankh gifs on it. I was obsessed with it. One day, my boyfriend at the time wanted us to go out somewhere, and I looked at him and whined, “But I want to stay here and work on my website!” Thankfully for my relationship, I realized that Angelfire was maybe not the best companion for me at that time. But I’ve never really stopped being obsessed. Not with that website, but other websites and blogs that came after, all of them. Even this one you’re reading now, that I barely write in.
It’s funny how the long-ago days of hand-coding everything in Notepad sparked a love of something that’s still with me to this day. I used to take my blogs so seriously. Before there were platforms like Blogger, I would create a different-looking page for every entry and it was so much fun. This site you’re looking at now isn’t quite as involved as those early creations (pictured above), but I’ve spent hours here fiddling around in the CSS and deconstructing a block of something, taking it apart to see how it works, putting it back together in the way I want. They were hours happily spent.
There are parts of my early internet days I miss: the permission to be creative for its own sake, true anonymity if you wanted it, the nascent thrill of connecting with another person, a whole other life, anywhere in the world. I do admit that I’ve had difficulty with the way blogging is now, compared to the days when we called them “online journals” and were at once so earnest and guarded because we could be, we could be anyone at all, write anything at all, and nobody knew our names. While I enjoy the sort of legitimacy blogs now have, I do sometimes miss that feeling of throwing your line out into the dark and waiting to see what happened, never certain anything would happen.
If you’d asked me in high school if I would be 36 and still in love with creating websites and writing things that only a handful of people would read, I would have said no. But I am! I just can’t believe it’s been 20 years!