When Was Your Blog-Ha Moment?


Alan's talking about his Blog-Ha Moment - when blogging "clicked" for him, and suddenly became part of what he did every day.

For me, I started dabbling with blogging after the dot-com eLearning company I was working for self destructed at The End of The Internet Bubble, in March 2001. I needed something to distract my mind from litigation, corporate cornholing, and other business-related evilness.

So I started poking around with Blosxom. I wanted to pick up a bit of Perl, and wanted to start a journal. Yes, my first blog was a lame-assed "it sure is hot today" personal journal. There's a reason why the online archives of my blog don't go back to the beginning... actually, I remembered this wrong... I started with MacJournal, in an offline journal, while poking around with the source for Blosxom to see what good Perl code looked like. The two things didn't meet for a few months...

For the first few months, I was just toying around, and writing a bit. The first incarnation was hosted on the machine I was using for consulting (the birth of CAREO) - a spanky new Powerbook G4 400 - and the blog was hosted as static files on my .Mac account (gasp! no comments!)

Sometime after I started working full time at the Learning Commons, I bit the bullet and migrated my blog to MovableType, hosted on the LC''s webserver. This went on for about a year, when I switched back to Blosxom. Then to WordPress.

My Blog-Ha moment was likely the same one as Alan's - the What's the Fuss About RSS? presentation/performance-art doowackie I did with Alan and Brian in July 2003 (the first Three Amigos Joint) pushed it over the edge for me. Blogging was now a powerful tool for forming strong professional (and personal) relationships - which have lasted to this day.

Once I realized that blogging was more than just me documenting banality - it was a way to communicate and collaborate etc... - blogging switched into an indispensable part of what I do.

Update: I just realized - I didn't start blogging with Blosxom. I started offline, in MacJournal (which is a pretty cool journal app). It was only after a few months of offline journalling that I started migrating to online stuff.

I just took a quick look through my archives, and it's kind of funny to see the posts-per-month increase rather dramatically in the spring of 2003, building up to the Fuss about RSS presentation, and just keeping on going after that...


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Last updated: September 24, 2023