Scatmania

Blogger

See also my blog!

Why blog? I guess every blogger's reasons are different, and I guess that I've been keeping a blog for so long that I'm allowed to have had my reasons change a few times along the way, too.

I first started writing what could later have been called a blog back in 1998, on my first website, Castle Onza Net. At that time, I'd not heard about OpenDiary (the web's first instant weblogging system, then new, and the precursor to bigger services like LiveJournal) or even the word weblog (which had been coined the previous year by Jorn Barger). What I did know, though, was a smattering of HTML 3.2 and enough Perl to write a few basic CGIs, so I got started on publishing my life online.

I wrote about my college life, turning 18, the things I was getting up to and the people I was doing so with - in hindsight, I was perhaps the internet's first angsty teen blogger - and my writings, entitled (somewhat pretentiously) The Avatar Diary were so drab and boring that they got little attention even from the people that knew me. But there was somebody who was reading them...

Not confident enough in Perl to write a commenting system, I'd taken to publishing my e-mail address (it was a lot safer to do so, back then, and not get spammed) on my website and allowing people to get in touch and leave feedback (which I'd then manually add, as comments) to my posts. One such commenter went by the alias titchypud, and her attention on my website was a great ego-boost: this was somebody I hadn't specifically badgered into visiting my site, and who kept coming back.

I got a little spooked, though, when she and a friend travelled half-way across the country to a nightclub where I'd mentioned on my diary that my friends and I would be at, and introduced herself to me. Drunk as I was - and egged on by my young and testosterone-fuelled friends - I spent some time talking to her, and it wasn't until the morning that I thought a little deeper about the incident and come to the conclusion that I had a cyber-stalker.

Until that point, I'd never fully equated the relationship between the things I'd written onto my web page and the things that happened in the world of the people who read it (few though they were). In my mind, subconciously, I'd been treating my online presence as my own personal, private diary. In March 1999, shortly after the incident, I stopped publishing and deleted the old posts. A handful of the posts from January 1999 have since been recovered (I had a rogue backup which I discovered a few years back), but most are lost.

My weblog returned in a different form in September 1999. I'd still never seen anybody else publish anything similar on the web or otherwise, and had nothing to compare mine to when I launched Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, a subscription e-mail list that chronicled my discoveries and my new-found freedom having moved out of home and gone to University. Later issues were also archived to a web page, bringing back the web to my log. Apart from the dates associated with them - some of which are definately incorrect - these have almost all been recovered and are now archived on this website.

After this, if you're reading my weblog chronologically (you mad fool), you'll find a big gap. At this point in my life, most of my activities were published, if anywhere, to AvAngel.com. There's a few of these old posts lying around on my current blog, too.

The next major development was in June 2003, when I relaunched my weblog as a proper web application with a backend and commenting and an XML feed and everything. At that time, a lot of my friends were getting LiveJournal accounts and, not wanting to use a system with so many restrictions as LiveJournal, I launched my own weblog where I could be in control of it. The back-end engine has changed a couple of times since then, and the style and theming even moreso, but the idea has still been the same as when I first started: publishing my thoughts and my actions online.

Except that's not entirely true. To begin with, back in 1998, what I really needed wasn't a weblog but an honest-to-goodness paper-based diary. And in September 1999 what I needed wasn't a mailing list but a weblog!

Today, I write about what I'm doing, what I'd like to do, and what I love and hate. I write about the technology and the news that interests me, link to the web's latest jokes and memes, and try to invoke discussions with my friends. I write about the things that I'd talk about with my friends, only they're not there: they're next door, or down the street, or in another town, or in another country. It's not an "expert blog" with expert information or reviews or the latest political commentry: it's just me and my friends doing what we've always done through a slightly less-conventional medium. And that's cool.

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