Friday, April 24, 2015

Julia: The Twelve Year Long Blogger

Me in 2005 post anime convention.
Oh, youth.
I've been a blogger a long time. Over a decade. There could be a VH1 special about me. I love the Bloggers: Julia. Anyway I've been busy and not-reading lately instead using my free hours to binge watch Friends or take part on a softball team, but I wanted to sort of do a nostalgic post looking back on things and then hopefully having you all do the same in the comments. If this isn't your thing, thats cool. Your regularly scheduled programs will be back again next time :)

Back when I was just getting into the internet, I made my first website in Geocities at age 13. I  didn't really turn it into an active blog-like diary until I was sixteen or so. There were four or five of us that had a little ring of online diaries that we would all read. So like the stepping stone between writing things down in an actual journal and the Facebook posts of today that everyone can see.

Since those days, in some venue or another, I have been sharing my thoughts with the world. From Geocities to LiveJournal to Goodreads to Blogger to Booklikes. It's crazy to think it all started with a page that I called "Dont Feed the Ducks" and had a script attached to it so as you moved your mouse a trail of ducks would appear. Typical 90s internet.

When I recently found a log of my first site I found it actually had little paragraph reviews of books I loved. I did a lot of fan-girling and I am pretty sure I used up my exclamation limit for the year on that one page, but how fun to know that even starting out, before sites like Goodreads were popular, I was wanting to share my favorite books with the world.

When I moved to LiveJournal I apparently didn't review books much, but I didn't read as much in college outside the curriculum until really my super senior year. But even then I still had tags for 'books', 'reading', 'rom-novs'. Primarly though, time was spent in the Harry Potter fandom and bitching about college. It was so fun though to go back and find my reworking of the lyrics of the song Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I reworked it into Everybody Ought to Have a Snape in a few hours after my friend said I couldn't do it.

Me in the summer of 2007, complete with modified
duckface and MacBook photobooth filters
Then came Goodreads. I was on there waaaay back when it was just like a singular feed. You didn't have friends, just saw what everyone was reading. I remember scrolling past the popular ones and just looking at what was added recently to try and find new and interesting books. The bookshelves never really changed though.

It was a while before I started doing real reviews on there, I am not quite sure what drove me to writing reviews. Maybe the fact that I found some of them, especially the well balanced ones, helpful in figuring out if a book was to my taste. I still to this day find the most use out of a three star review or a negative review because that I can see what the person didn't like and if it would bother me at all or is something that would make me actually enjoy it.

Reviews led me to groups which led me to the College Students group which led me here. I wont go too crazy and keep typing because if you've read this far I commend you. We are coming up on five year of this blog in a few months. Can you believe it's been that long? I guess my nostalgia just came a bit early this year.

Join in the nostalgic fun! How long have you been blogging or part of the blogging community? How about the book part of it? Got any good stories from your early internet years? Join in! Or just read!
Enjoy the weekend!


7 comments:

  1. I had a blog-type thing on a forum in 2005. I rediscovered it a while ago and cringed so hard from the things I wrote there! But as for the bookish part: that came much later.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh geocities! I never really blogged per se --- I never felt like I had that much interesting stuff to say --- but I did get REALLY into web development. I built some crazy CSS-based web designs using geocities to experiment. I think that was mostly ages 12-14 or so. Then I started writing and spent most of my time on fictionpress.com posting my stories and commenting on others. Then I just stopped because, well, college. I got way more into student org stuff and didn't spend much time online (I also didn't strictly speaking HAVE internet for two years). And when I graduated I started blogging :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh goodness. I wouldn't really call what I did blogging back then, but I started off designing my own websites with the likes of Geocities, angelfire back in middle school (the nineties),there were forums on the chicken soup for the soul website at one point where I wrote poetry, and then as the internet grew I guess I grew along with it somewhat. You had myspace, livejournal,a place called deadjournal. (I was a bit morbid), and then for the past 4 years my blog.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I started blogging in July 2009 as a way to communicate with my students here at the high school. My first book reviews were aimed at my students only. I thought if I advertised it enough students would find their way to the blog and come back regularly. Call me naive.

    After a few months I realized that wasn't happening and that I essentially had no readers, so I went out onto the blogosphere searching for other book blogs and followers. I am a lukewarm follower in the blogging world because I don't want to spend all my time with giveaways, and reading other peoples blogs. I want to spend the majority of time reading books I think my students will like and writing reviews for them. Early on I joined TOP TEN TUESDAY as a way to highlight books I hope my readers will find. I always make myself visit at least ten sites linked and I always leave comments if I do visit. I am surprised, therefore, how few comments I get in return. It tells me that people want people to visit their sites but don't return the favor to others. Oh well, there are so many book blogs now and so little time. I understand how overwhelming the whole thing can be.

    This past year I have become re-energized on my blog and partially use it as a way to communicate with family and friends...less about just books, more about personal stuff. Prior to this re-energized situation I was contemplating giving up the blog because it felt like I wasn't making a difference in anyone's life. But it would seem like the day I thought this, would be the day someone would randomly mention they were reading a book I mentioned on my blog. So I would keep on going for a few months until the next comment would come in in reference to something that was seen on my blog.

    At this point I am sticking with it. We'll see what next year brings. I've twirled around TOP TEN TUESDAY so many times that few weekly topics cover questions I haven't already addressed in past years. Therefore I only join in the fun only once a month or so now. But thanks for hosting it. It has been a good way to connect with other bloggers.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow! I tend not to stick with the same obsessions on the long run, so I'm quite impressed with you doing this for over a decade! I've been blogging on tumblr for about two years and started my review blog about 6 months ago I think.

    ReplyDelete
  7. nice information..
    I wouldn't really call what I did blogging back then, but I started off designing my own websites

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts with Thumbnails