I’m Not a Blogger, Really – The Secret About Blogs
I’m not a blogger really–if you didn’t already guess by my posting infrequency. But I do own and use a lot of what people call blogs. I just don’t like to see them that way.
You see, I’ve been making web pages since 1995, and had a personal home page (remember those?) since 1996. My first page was rather minimalist, and in a sense, a rebellion against what I’m doing here–writing a dialog with you in typical “blog post” fashion. Back then I felt that no one really went online to know more about a complete stranger. I still think I was right about that at the time (although things have changed). At least I sure never cared about what most people put on their home pages at that time. My page was utilitarian: find resources related to gaming, programming, music, or whatever else I happened to be interested in. More accurately, it was useful to me, a place I could store and show off a few things, including a rather cool photo album for the times.
So I had web pages. I knew HTML. The web got more complicated. Sites like fortunecity or geocities offered free web space, and had “web page builder” software. The web got even more complicated. Not only did the web page builders fall short of meeting expectations, but writing a web page by hand got more and more tedious as the HTML and CSS spec started to demand higher quality pages. And then came blogs, or web logs. I thought they were retarded. It was a throwback to the old personal home page days (and actually I was kind of right about that too), where people would narcissistically post things about what they did in their everyday lives as if we were interested in reading their personal diary. I really didn’t like the word “blog” either.
But eventually I started looking for ways to not have to write all that HTML, CSS, and PHP code anymore. (Honestly, I guess with PHP included headers and footers, I probably spent less time creating websites back then than I do with upgrading WordPress and installing plugins now.) WordPress was pretty nice, but I didn’t have any use for an online “diary.” My first “blog” was just a simple web log that I kept as notes on Linux configuration that I had done to the server I was running. So all the entries looked roughly like this:
New IMAP Certificate
Generated new IMAP certificate:
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem -keyout /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem -days 365
Yeah, that’s it sparky. But at least I had found some use for blog software. And the great thing about it was, I could quickly post new content without having to fuss with making a web page. And that is the secret about blogs. They reduce the complexity of making web pages that even the page builders couldn’t do because the page builders tried to let you do too much. In other words:
Blog software provides the structure for your content, making it consistent and easy to both post and navigate.
Forget about diaries. Your “blog” is just a web page, if you want it to be. This is true especially with WordPress.
My next blog was “Angelo’s Notepad” and I appropriately selected the Rubrick Theme which had been pretty popular at that time and fit the blog title pretty well. Angelo’s Notepad was really just a place for me to throw up things I didn’t have time to format and put up more “formally” on my websites. But then, WordPress did the best thing it could have done for people like me: it created wonderful support for “pages” as well as “posts” and allowed you to set a page to be the front page. This is all you need to create a website.
So I use WordPress to build websites. Does that make me a blogger?
Categories: Computer, Personal, Society
3 Comments »
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May 1st, 2009 at 10:49 am
I am guessing it was GeoCities way back when… ?
June 13th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
I didn’t really use Geocities much. The first non-school site I had was on Angelfire, because it was what my friend was using.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:49 am
This is interesting, Angeko. I agree with you that ‘blogging software’ make it easy for the majority of people to step into the world of owning website, whaterver the content is a personal or business blog. I’m a normal user myself and used to go through desinging websites for myself for fun till the PHP began to lead.
I think you are aware about CMS systems like ‘Joomla!’ which already another step for establishing whole websites without any serious HTML/PHP background as we used to do in the old days.
Finaly, I hope I didn’t place a long comment but I read your comment over ‘ma.tt’ blog regarding SPAM and I replied thier. That’s how I found your blog. Check http://ma.tt/2009/04/spam-seo/