The Rules:
-Thank the blogger who nominated you.
-Tell a little bit about how you started blogging.
-Give two pieces of advice for new bloggers.
-Nominate 15 other bloggers.
Fourteen Years -- Don't They Go By in a Blink
I started blogging 14 years ago this month. I was 22 years old, had been married for four months, and had graduated from college the previous spring. I was holding down my first full-time job and reading all the books I'd been wanting to read during college but never had time for. Good times! One day, I picked up a newspaper in my workplace's lunch room and read an article about these new things called "web logs" or "blogs" that had started cropping up on the internet. Lots of people were experimenting with them, using them a lot like online journals that could be shared with other people. The article mentioned several sites where you could get your own blog for free, and I copied down that list and decided to look into all this. Hey, I was a writer, I had things to say, and other people might even want to read them! Sounded like fun.
My first years of blogging are very much like keeping an online journal. If you read back through those very old posts (and I'm not suggesting you do that, because 22-year-old me was kind of pretentious sometimes), you won't find me writing book and movie reviews as we think of them today. It's a lot of me just nattering about whatever I was into at the moment and felt like typing up a paragraph or two about. Which I still do to some extent, but my posts are a leeeetle more structured now. Also, back then you couldn't add photos easily, and I didn't know enough HTML to add them the hard way, so my old posts all look really blah to me now, lol.
If You Take My Advice...
Giving advice is tricky, isn't it? I don't know what you, newer blogger, want to know about blogging! My best piece of advice is to follow links. If you've found a blog you enjoy, see if they have a list of blogs they like. Most bloggers do, either in a sidebar (scroll on down a ways and you'll see such a list here on my blog, and a totally different set on my book blog) or on a dedicated page. If you like their blog, chances are you might like some of the blogs they enjoy. Also, when a blogger you admire does a tag like this and tags a bunch of other bloggers, see if they provided links to those blogs, because you might like those as well.
Then study the blogs you enjoy, figure out what you like about them. Do you like their content, their writing style, their layout, the way they answer comments? Learn from them! Don't copy them. Figure out how to make your own blog something that interests you. Do you love reading movie reviews? Write up your thoughts on a movie! Do you love reading book reviews? Review one! Do you like bloggers who share deep thoughts on meaty subjects? Figure out what you think about things yourself, and share.
And the Nominees Are:
Anyone who wants to do this tag. I've been doing a ton of tags lately, and I don't want to wear out my welcome by tagging lots of people constantly. If you're looking for something to post about, or you have blogging advice you want to share, consider yourself tagged!
My first one I started was as a result of my favorite game site being down, and the game site had set up a blog to keep us that had paying memberships informed. I don't remember when I started it, but I deleted it in favor of another, which I lost interest in a few years ago. My current one has only been up for a year this month.
ReplyDeleteQuiggy, I've abandoned several blogs too. This is the original blog I started, but for a while I had a blog dedicated to crafting that was linked to my Etsy shop, and then I briefly had a homeschooling blog, both of which I abandoned due to lack of (my) interest eventually. I also had a writing-oriented blog for several years, but quit posting to it when I started my book review blog, which I'm still actively using. It happens! Good thing they're free, huh?
DeleteWow! 14 years! I hadn't realized you'd been blogging for that long. That's amazing! :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for filling out the tag. It was really cool to hear your advice on blogging. What you said about following links makes so much sense!
Miss March, yup, kind of an astonishing amount of time, huh? I'm going to have to figure out something cool for next year when it's my 15th.
DeleteI'm glad you liked the advice!
Aha!Nice answers :) I second Miss March is saying 14 years is indeed a very long time and I had no idea you had been blogging for that long - or that blogs were actually a thing back then. Nice work, you must have seen a lot of changes in those years!
ReplyDeleteElf, yup, blogs have been around longer than some of the bloggers I know have been alive!
DeleteDefinitely a lot of changes over the years. When I started, there were about 6 backgrounds to choose from, and you couldn't adjust your template very easily. Blogs were more about words and less about pictures, sidebars basically just had archives, and labels didn't exist on Blogger, though they did on LiveJournal, where I also blogged briefly. And user icons didn't exist either! Pretty crazy.