I received an email (I was so excited someone actually read my blog and wasn’t a spam bot) asking me about my blogging history.  Blogging history?  I had to send a reply to exactly explain to me what she (yes, it was a she which means girls do exist) meant by “blogging history” (yes, I’m doing the “fingers” quotation “movement” as I “type” this) and she replied that I was an idiot and should stop stalking her… uhm, that she wanted to know a timeline of when and what about my blogging, like when I started, how I started, what phases the blog went through, if I was wearing pants at anytime I was blogging, that sort of thing.  I was going to the story of stone soup today, but I guess I will do a LIST!

The history of Yoggie blogging…

• Mid 1997 – buckled down and created a website.  Nothing much there as I copied most of the elements from other people’s website, though I used my own design.  Included on the front page of the site was a thing I called “Site News” that I updated on what was happening with the site.  This a plain HTML page that was updated maybe every 20 days or so, primarily about the site itself with some clever (at least I thought so) anecdotes included.
• End of 1997 – “Site News” morphed into “What’s New” becoming a server-side include text file that was easier to update, and the content became more of a journal.
• May 1998 – “What’s New” and the web site news separated into two distinct entities and old “What’s New” entries went into an archive page. Pretty much was updating the information every couple of days.
• June 1999 – found this wonderful software that allowed you to install and update a weblog on your site.  It was still all HTML but it used templates and had a built in archive system.  All you had to do was type in your blog entry in the software and it rebuilt your entire index page and added archive HTML pages. Beat doing it by hand.  At this point I was posting just about everyday except on weekends and holidays.
• Late 2000 – started playing around with Java, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL to come up with some way of making it easier to post blog entries.  Was not aware of the work being done in Movable Type and other blogging software.  Never got very far with it.
• Early 2001 – I was invited to share my blog hosted by another person so I started blogging using more sophisticated server-based blogging software.
• January 3, 2003 – I started blogging with a sub-domain of a dear friend who decided to share some server space to host my blog.
• Mid 2004 – I felt bad about smooching on my friends so I bought my own web hosting plan and set up my blog there with Movable Type.  This was the point I lost everything prior to January 3, 2003 (always do backups).  I was at this time blogging one to five times a DAY EVERYDAY.  This was also back when I had a list of blogs I checked daily, had lots of fellow bloggers on my blogroll, and was up to a B-list blogger with A-list bloggers consistently leaving comments.
• Late 2006 – decided that the name of my blog “A Lackluster Blog” was too mundane (and there were other blogs using similar names) and went for the less descriptive “The Mighty Yog Blog”  and picked up the domain name yogblog.com and .net (funny, when I picked the name, no one was using Yog, now there are hundreds of them).  This is caused a bit of a problem and I ended up loosing my contacts because the person that picked up my previous domain name ruined my reputation.  This was also the time I switched to WordPress.
• February 2007 to mid 2008 – I got into such a funk that I was blogging less and less, sometimes going weeks with no entries.  That kind of thing kills you readership and your rating in the blogosphere.
• Mid 2008 to present – I climbed back on the horse and forced myself to start blogging again.  Currently up to blogging once or twice a day and looking into getting myself back in the limelight of the blogging ranks. 

Yes, I was one of those early bloggers, one of the dinosaurs.  Not like Justin Hall, who was the pre-life ooze that spawn us bloggers back in 1994, but I pretty close to the original source.

Email this post