Blogiversary!!! Four years ago today — on the 22nd of July, 2003 — I wrote my first blahg entry and I’m taking today to ramble on (and on) about blahgging.

I’ve had a website since 1999 or thereabouts but, until four years ago today, it was a static site that I used for posting pictures and linking to weather and other stuff. Here’s what it looked like in 2001. That’s the earliest version that the Internet Archive has. By the time I wrote my first blahg entry, I had moved beyond the black background and adopted a loverly tables-based layout.

When I wrote my first entry, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Mouse and I had arrived at the beach for a month or so, leaving Lizard Breath and the GG sweltering on the Planet Ann Arbor. I’m not crazy about using the phone, so I started writing little two or three line blurbs about what we had done that day and posting badly optimized pictures. To my surprise, one or two people *besides* my immediate family started emailing comments. When we returned to the Planet Ann Arbor late that August, I kept writing. I made my “blahg” the focus of my home page and devised a system of archiving old posts by month, which you can get to here. Eventually I figured out that blogging software existed but it wasn’t until spring of 2006 that I got around to installing WordPress. I started a project to convert the archived posts to WordPress but that involved a lot of tedious copying, pasting, and html coding, so I soon put it on hiatus. I may get to it eventually. Frankly, enough crap has happened in the last couple years that revisiting a lot of my old posts just depresses me. My brain spends enough time reliving the bad times of last few years on its own. I don’t need to go back and read about it. For now, anyway. I know I’ll feel differently eventually.

I have written an entry every single day for the last four years. That surprises me a little. Yes, there are days when it’s hard to think of what to write. There are other days when I can think of three or four topics. *Something* always comes up, even on the longest, sleepiest, boring-est of days. I edit and edit and edit and edit, even sometimes after I post. I like to write but I have a lot to learn. I know when I’m not hitting the mark. I think some of my best posts happen when I just sit down and ramble incoherently but I can’t always do that. If you catch me in a spelling error or extra apostrophe, HIT ME! I am a stickler about those things but proofing yourself can be tricky. On the other hand, sometimes I deliberately misspell things or use incorrect grammar. It’s my blahg and it’s about my [so-called] life. It is what it is.

My personal set of blahgging rules and conventions is continually evolving but here’s more or less where it stands at the moment:

• My posts are essentially “snapshots” of my [so-called] life. It is dangerous to blahg about your job or school or whatever on the Internet. It’s a public venue. A bad day will often appear on my blahg as humor. On the other hand, I might write some long, rambly, angst-filled rant on an otherwise good, productive day, just something I had to get out of my system. A cryptic entry might be disguising something real or I might just be feeling particularly random that day.
• I will skirt the edges of most controversial issues like politics and religion. Opinions and values on these things come in RGB, not B/W. Everyone who reads this (all ten of you) has different opinions. Sometimes my own opinions change from day to day. Arguing about that kind of stuff is not worth the stress.
• I will take on things like the public schools or incompetent customer service or bad business practices or real estate developers. As a citizen and consumer, I will exercise free speech on those kinds of issues if I feel the need.
• Blahgging about my beach urchins will usually fall into one of several categories: 1) technical, i.e., moving or graduating or similar life change, 2) memories of when they were little, 3) something that we did or experienced *together*. If they want to talk about themselves on the Internet, they can. And Mouse does. When she is so inclined. It’s probably a good thing the Internet wasn’t around when they were babies. I’d’ve prob’ly been posting about poop and the whole works. Some people do.
• Dead aminals: In the early days, I posted *occasional* photos of seagull or fish or rodent carcasses. I now put them behind links. The GG was just absolutely jumping up and down with glee at my recent Beach Flotsam post. “That’s your best post *ever*!” said he. I’m sure not everyone agrees.
• Despite the Kayak Woman moniker, I don’t try to be anonymous myself, the site is copyrighted under both of my aliases. I refer to other people by nickname or first name if I can’t think of an appropriate nickname. That goes for people I know personally. Public figures are on their own.

I wrote my first blahg entry on a 12″ screen G4 Mac powerbook connected to the internet via a very slow dial-up. I had a wireless card in that thing but it was a few months later that I actually turned it on and used it. Now I’m using a 13″ screen Intel Macbook (white) and I can almost *always* find a nice, fast wireless connection. Even on the beach. That’s just astounding. My brain does something I can’t put into words when it tries to hook that reality up with the days when we had outdoor plumbing at the beach and the only person with a phone was my uncle, who needed it because his career as a doctor often required him to report ASAP to the emergency room. I can still remember his phone ringing in the middle of the night.

Guest blahggers? Yes, bring it on! But I won’t post it unless the person who *wrote* it gives me explicit permission! This is the Internet, yaknow.

What’s next?

• A new design!!! I threw this one together in about five minutes. I want to do something more creative and get to know WordPress and php inside and out instead of just hacking around.
• Podcasts. Need time. And practice. And a decent microphone, etc.
• Better looking, web standards-compliant slide shows.

Last but not least! It is the birthday of my uber-cousin* Aimée and also that of my *other* uber-cousin’s husband, The Marquis! They are just catching up to my age, that means they are 50-something. But hey, 50 is the new 30! Grog grok grok grok! Pink is the new green! Pink is the new green! grokGROK!

*Uber-cousin just means that they were born the same year as me. Really, all of my cousins are uber-cousins.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.