My very first finished website was released to the digital ether towards the middle of the year 2000, when I was a sophomore in high school. I thought it would be cool to have a website, so I made one. It was a poetry site which exhibited rhyming narratives that I thought was ‘share’-worthy, and it was hosted on Homestead, when it was still unconditionally free. Afterward, I left the website alone to collect dust, and so did my interest in website making, until towards the end of my junior year in high school. I befriended someone when I was involved in a drama production in the first semester of the school year. We exchanged numbers, then interests. Before we knew it, we became very close. I found find out that she had a domain of her own. It looked good. She said something about ‘hard coding’ and the involvement of Notepad and other graphics-making applications. I nodded, seemingly coherent to the jargon. Either way, it piqued my interest again.With a little pushing, my very first personal website was created and hosted on Envy. It had an endless range of different subpages – most being for anything I could think of that would warrant a page of its own -- whether it would follow up with further updates or sit there forever without much use, quite like a trophy spouse. Then I added a ‘journal’ subpage, thinking that it wouldn’t progress into anything worth mentioning.
I don’t know whether or not the addition of the journal was serendipitous or one of my life’s ironies, but over the course of time, my main focus for the website was on the ‘journal’ section. After finishing my homework, I would make a short update as well as little tweaks on the general website itself. The word 'blog' slowly seeped into the reality of those maintaining sites, and a major shift in the personal website trend happened, causing many to turn their online repositories of boredom into internet diaries. The journal would later relocate and go from free hosting to a host (after quite a number had made offers to host me) and jump hosts a few more times before I landed my own domain. I lost my entire journal when moving from free hosting to hosting, but started a new one. I registered for accounts in Diaryland and Diary-X, but those never lasted for long. Then I rediscovered Blogger. I used Blogger before, but never got the hang of the templates. It took me a while before something clicked in my head about a coding priniciple where I realised the solution was under my nose all along. That's when my 'journal' became a 'blog' or a ‘weblog’. My account in Blogger would last for two years until I changed to Wordpress through the judicious counsel of the one who re-introduced me into webpage making in the first place. Altogether, it held a record of the end of a tumultuous friendship, to my high school senioritis, and even my high school graduation and my first days of university. Four or so years later, it has recorded my life as a design student, yet another graduation, a collection of past memories, outings with friends and family, my journey as a follower of the Roman Catholic Church, and anniversaries with my boyfriend.
During this process, my weblog initially started off as an account of ‘what I did today’ entries sprinkled with references to people who I knew offline who read the site. Later, it became a collective of ideas and thoughts that I wanted to have written down and when I opened comments, shared as a dialogue between me and those who commented. This was particularly helpful when I had been going through some hard times in the initial part of my college years and my weblog became a tool of catharsis and release. After emerging victorious from those hard times, I eventually mixed the two and was able to write each entry in the form of a story. Soon, that became my method of blogging. As a believer in being honest, I also believe in the art of telling a good story, delivering the truth in a way that people can sit to read and enjoy and perhaps share in the experience. I soon became comfortable with this, and even started writing short stories in the place of ‘what I did today’s, to take the extra step in being creative. While there are things that I choose not to reveal on my weblog for either personal or professional reasons, I became a storyteller, a muse, and I had my own space to practice my craft; the space became my platform for me to exercise my personal voice.
Before blogging – or any form of public journaling – I found there was little space for the personal voice. The only options available were columns, and even then, were written by a select few. Integrity was vouched for by hard facts and generally accepted principles that left little room for dialogue and debate. If any, they were given a sentence or two of brief publication but only enough so that it could be forgotten in time. Only later when blogging become a popular and even commercialised through its use in news websites and endorsements by public figures (i.e. political leaders, celebrities), did the value of the personal voice become realised. When I would visit the websites of my favourite music groups, there would a weblog section for the band members to update their fans on the progress of their tours or upcoming songs and albums. Non-government organizations that have assisted in the recent natural and man-made disasters leave updates on what is going on with their relief work, giving readers a picture of the work that is being done in the affected area. News sites have weblogs set up for some reporters and are open to comments that could possibly be mentioned on television (though not necessarily directly to the reporters themselves). With the sudden influx of the ‘web 2.0’ movement and the integration of so many applications, blogging had also taken on many forms. Firstly, it became an optional function for networking sites, which have provided those who do not want to get their own external space for their outlet but still want to write every now and then. Also, video blogging and voice blogging evolved from the pre-existing written blog entries and photography blogging. Blogging had developed so much, and now, there were so many options at people’s disposal on how they wanted to go out projecting their own personal voice. I feel lucky to have entered the blogosphere relatively early because I went from a teenager to an adult in the process, and I became witness to its evolution and got the best of both worlds.
Success in blogging, for me, is personal, because the purpose of weblogs is likely to differ from person to person. My weblog, for most part, is personal, and most of my networking generally consists of those who share the similar purpose of ‘day to day with occasional thoughts’ blogging and a smaller circle consisting of people who know me offline that might know about its existence. The rest is all in the question of chemistry: if they like what they see, they come back, and the same goes for my personal preferences on weblogs: if I like what I see, I keep on returning. After all, I find that good personal weblogs showcase the author’s personality as well.
For a long time, I have viewed my own weblog as a documentation of my own life in progress, a never ending story done in first person in a very raw form. It only ends when the author calls for it, but that’s only the weblog, because a life will continue to be a work in progress. On the practical side, it has helped me maintain my passion for writing and is a helpful in terms of providing me an outlet that balances out my regular obligations. Being a design student, I have done assignments that require a lot of drawing and 3-dimensional modeling, but very little writing. I believe this is one of the reasons that keep me going until today. I just hope that regardless of how long my own weblog shall ‘live’, that it has a good ‘life’ while it lasted.
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