7.24.2009

The news at 11

Everything has been imported. It was much easier than I expected. Read the stories below.

I'm utterly convinced...

that this is, in fact, the correct way to go.
* * *
I did the self-built, pay-for-host blog back in high school and up into my freshman year. These were the last days before the great social networking revolution (hereto: GSNR) and it was a unique thing to have your own staked out claim on the web.
It was a good site. I had flash and iframes and my own graphics. The best part was that I coded it, not some program that just took my preferences and generated a page. I worked on that site for hours, coding into the night, making a frame sit just right, learning new work-arounds for browser non-standardization. Then as soon as the first version launched I began work on version 2.0, and again for 3. But I had fewer responsibilities then and that's just far too much work to do now. Working and trying to have a social life and have time for sleep kinda eat up most of my time. Any time I do get is spent writing.
* * *
I got a myspace back when I only knew two or three other people that had one. And even then, I only kinda knew them. Now, we live in a world where people used to give out their myspace url's instead of their digits. Shit's crazy.
At first the concept of a prefab space just for me was enticing. But over time it became stagnant so I left. Then people started figuring out how to splice code into the page and it got a interesting again. This was the GSNR big bang. I could wash the sterility off myspace and replace it with something a little more... different. And it was still kinda easy. And people started noticing.
Once I got the appearence set I started writing a blog. (This is where my initial interest in writing came from, methinks.)
The blog feature was a large portion of the user interface in the early versions of myspace and a user couldn't just ignore it. I didn't really know what to use for content so I just wrote what I knew. Me. It was simple and introspective. More of a journal or diary than anything else. But it was boring. People were interested in posting on the wall anyway. So I never really used it much.
* * *
Around this time I had an aquaintence at another nearby university and she mentioned something about Facebook. Check that, thefacebook.com. Old school facebook. What a great thing! It was perfect for staying in touch with old high school friends in college far away or back home. But you couldn't really do much with it. It actually became refreshing when myspace got out of hand and became nearly impossible to navigate without insane musical spasms and visually assaulting graphics coming out of your browser.
Then facebook got a big head. Everyone could come aboard and they could customize it, not much but in little ways. and then facebook got clunky. The blog funtionality became buried and hardly anyone used it. It was treated more like a directory with a comment box. But it's the social networking site. There are no others.
* * *
I had both a wordpress and a tumblr. They were true ready-made blogs that focused on content. It was exactly what I wanted, but you just can't see them. Hardly anyone's heard of wordpress anymore and even fewer know what tumblr is.
Blogger has been around forever and most interesting pre-fab blogs I read are blogspot sites. So this is my current direction. If I want to be an interesting writer and have a simple web presence it should be here.
* * *
So, I'm going to import the good stuff from the other places to here. Stay tuned.