Thursday 26 May 2011

A trip down memory lane

After such a long absence from the regular blogging, I thought it was about time to pick this up again. Twitter may be a great way to force yourself down to the bare essentials, but sometimes you really do want to say more than can be contained within 140 characters. As you can see below, this used to be just a dumping ground for my travel posts, but that's all going to change...

I can't say for sure what the new posts will be comprised of, but knowing me they will probably mostly revolve around food. You might be wondering why I so titled this post, and it's because deciding to try and regularly blog again is like putting on a really old, well-worn but comfortable pair of shoes. It seems like - and was in fact - years ago when I started blogging at the tender age of 15 (!). Now 27, I feel like a bit of a grizzled veteran. Like:

Back in the day, before all these newfangled things like Twitter or FourSquare or Tumblr, we had to write our own HTML if we wanted to make a website... Most people started out on Geocities. Back in 1998 when I was 14, I had a website with a background I had made up myself using Corel Draw... I was so proud to be one of the first to use a layout with TABLES! And of course I NEVER embedded background midis without letting people turn them off! I was all about the emoticons like ^_^ O.o and >_< Then the blogging craze started and everyone was using this service called pitas.com... Of course that went under, so after that I was tossing up between xanga and LiveJournal, but LJ was so much more social, with the emoticons and Friends Only posts... And of course we were IMing each other on ICQ as well... Ah, those were the days!

Reminiscing aside, blogging hasn't really changed that much in this past decade. Basically, you write a whole bunch of text and upload it to some webpage, that people can read. You may have social media gadgets and promote your posts via Twitter and Facebook, but it's still all about the copy. The only thing that's different is probably the ability to blog on the go via smartphones, but a touchscreen or even slide-out keyboard isn't exactly conducive to typing many paragraphs of text. That's where tablets can't really trump a traditional keyboard - there's nothing more satisfying than the tactile feedback of the keys bouncing back when you type for hours on end. That's why we always take our netbook when we travel, I would hate to have to type out whole blog posts on my tiny phone keyboard!

Even though I won't be travelling around somewhere exciting like I usually would when I've been blogging these past few years, I'll still try my best to keep this interesting! Let's see how that pans out.