On Blogging > part two: a history lesson

I'm nowhere near as good at blogging as most of my peers out here on the 'Net, and I know it. Sometimes I post about things that only I care about, and sometimes I get intimidated and don't post at all, for long stretches of time. Finding your voice and your passion is important, but it's not easy.

This blog, in it's various incarnations, has had many different topics and themes, and it's gone through several distinct stages in its lifetime, some successful, some... not so much.

I. the beginning: dirty laundry

It started as "Three Gears Spinning", a hand-coded, personal e-diary on Blogger (remember what I said about e-diaries). That didn't last very long, as I had no readers except for my close friends, and as I quickly discovered, airing my dirty laundry on the Internet is a quick way to piss people off.

Eventually I found that I had alienated some of my closest friends by writing things which may or may not be true, but which had no business being discussed on a public forum. It was a colossally dumb move on my part, and I paid the price. This is part of why I don't like e-diaries: aside from the fact that they're inane, they're also dangerous and really foolish.

II. blogging about blogging... about blogging

With guidance from a professor and a web design class, "Three Gears Spinning" was revamped into a website about blogging, which enjoyed a moderate level of success in academic circles, but ultimately I wasn't challenged or even engaged by my own subject. I spun it off into it's own site (which still exists, for archive purposes), and even though I haven't updated it in years and the information it contains is badly out-of-date, sadly it's still the most frequently linked-to part of my existing site, to this day. I couldn't tell you how or why, but I'm guessing it's because I had something unique to say, at the time, and I said it well. That and a lot of college professors don't regularly check their links to make sure they're still relevant. I've been thinking about updating the site and maintaining it again, but that's a big project for another day.

After I spun off "Blogging 101", I went back to the e-diary thing, except I learned my lesson and kept most of the personal stuff personal. Let me tell you, the new "Three Gears Spinning" was a very boring blog. Without the juicy drama of my personal life, essentially what I had was a daily run down of every little thing I had done during that day; and my life at that point didn't consist of very much aside from school and work, and the occasional party. Luckily fate had more in store for "Three Gears Spinning".

III. those who can't do, review

At that stage, I was working at a video store, and starting to become a real movie buff, what with all the free rentals and all the free time I had on my hands. Eventually I created a section on my site listing my favorite movies and describing them. That seemed to go over well, as I found that overnight I had quadrupled my reader base: I went from one regular reader (me) to four (me plus a friend plus two random strangers), and I was getting feedback from my readers. Wanting to repeat my overwhelming success, I created a companion section, listing my least favorite movies and describing those as well. I didn't get any more readers from that, but the existing ones sent me twice as much feedback. I was a hit! The focus of the blog quickly switched from my boring personal life to movies and what I thought of them, and I found I actually had a decent base of regular readers, and my readership was growing steadily through word of mouth as I kept writing. Which, in the world of blogging before sites like Digg came around and changed everything, meant my blog was very successful.

The next major change happened quickly. Shortly after changing the focus of my blog to movies, I found that people actually wanted to contribute to the site. It started with a single request: a friend of mine had a few reviews he wanted me to put up on my site. Then a few other people caught wind and wanted in on the action, and the next thing I knew I had a virtual harem of movie reviewers willing to contribute to my site regularly. Except that up until that point my site had been designed for a single, web-savvy poster. I needed to give my site a more user-friendly back end, and quickly, because Penn Jillette's advice works backstage too: No one wants to jump through hoops to write for you, so make it easy for them.

I tried. I started a forum, I switched blogging APIs several times, I even purchased webhosting. Nothing worked, though: I couldn't find a blogging application that gave me sufficient control over the look and feel of my site, but that was easy for someone without web design experience to work with. As I tinkered around with different solutions, I found that my reviewers and my readers were one by one losing interest and wandering away. What was worse, though, was that with all the porting and transferring, eventually the entire body of content that I had accumulated over several years of blogging disappeared; either I lost it or I was too lazy to port it and just abandoned it. That's another good point for web design in general, but it applies to blogging as well: Maintain your archives. Even as they get old and outdated, they're still relevant, and often they'll attract more new readers than your new stuff. That's just the way it is.

IV. the road to hell is paved with blah blah blah

And so it was that I found myself where I am today. Eventually I stumbled upon Drupal, which was exactly what I was looking for to maintain my community of movie reviewers. Except that by that point I had no more movie reviewers. And I had no more readers, either, and no archive to lure them back. And I was sick of watching movies. And I was sick of reviewing them. And, quite honestly, I was really fucking sick of putzing around with my website. I had to start from scratch, but I didn't have the energy to do that. So for a long while, I had a half-assed blog that I didn't feel like posting to.

I tinkered around with Drupal every once in a while, and posted something whenever I felt like posting something, but by and large the site (and my web design skills) lay fallow for quite a while.

Eventually I forced myself to make the decision I was dreading: either start working on the site again, or stop paying to keep it online. I decided to start working on it again, but the going was tough. I still had nothing to write about.

By December of 2005, I was posting semi-regularly again, though I still didn't have a purpose. That ended when I decided on starting my Weekly CD Program for 2006. I had a purpose, and even if it wasn't interesting for anyone but me, it gave me a reason to post at least once a week. Great!

The Program was a success, from my point of view. It helped me gradually work my way up to blogging regularly again, and gave me motivation to maintain the site. I was on a roll and things were going great... until a series of bad events in my personal life that started in August, after which I found myself once again uninterested in posting on a regular basis.

It's been on-again-off-again since, but I think I'm coming out of it. I'm starting to feel like I have a purpose to blog again, and it's showing in my writing. I'm not exactly sure what that purpose is, per se, but I feel it nonetheless. Why else do you think I'm here, typing up this long post on the history of my site, when I could easily be doing something else? I want to be, that's why!

Please note that the preceding history is recited more or less from memory, and as such it's possible and even likely that I've got one or two facts mixed up. Still, the overall story is true, so a few factual blunders does nothing to muddy the picture I'm painting. You get the idea.

Tomorrow I'll be discussing what makes bloggers tick, by using examples from out in the wild. Don't miss the blogging safari!