Ten Years on WordPress

I celebrated 10 years of blogging within the last few weeks.

I’d planned to publish this on the actual day, but hey, kids. Yet the date is not accurate.

I started blogging towards the end of the last millennia. I had discovered the art of blog via Samela Harris, a local journalist, in the Adelaide Advertiser (our city newspaper) one morning and decided “I could do that!”.

So it’s closer to 17 years.

I have always enjoyed writing, either poetry or prose, so felt it would be a great transition. It’s a great way to discuss photography and web design issues, review my concert attendances, plus write short stories.

I designed and built my first blog with blogger.com. I ripped the HTML to pieces to give it a unique style. I copied the HTML into MS Notepad, broke the HTML and CSS apart to build it, and created my own sprite-based menus. Thank you Jeffrey Zeldman!

Then I checked if other Adelaidians were also blogging:

I found Shai Coggins, an amazing and prolific writer, whose style blew my mind. With her as my inspiration, I changed my style, but I couldn’t keep up. Shai was going places.

But the inevitable was on its way: Monetization.

It didn’t take long for the internet community to realize there was LOTS of money to be made from monetized blogs. Sidebar adverts became mainstream and creativity was either killed, retired or buried.

It wasn’t called monetisation back then, but it was certainly making blogging an industry onto itself. Advertising was, and still does, making creative sites look ugly. I cringe that I have moved into this arena recently – I constantly want to remove them from one of my sites, but they help pay some bills.

You may notice I have removed Adsense advertising – and now only advertise our family products
– Honey, T-Shirts & Apparel, and Photography.

When I first started blogging, it was all about writing down my thoughts in the same way as if I was talking to you. It’s much more natural and the sentences flow better. Now that I write for a wider audience, I have simplified my style yet again. More like short story anecdotes.