Nineteen years ago—on the day after Christmas 2004—I registered my first Blogspot site. I’d had a few abortive attempts at starting an online writing space ever since discovering Wil Wheaton dot net in college; that was where I learned the word blog.
Maybe it was because I was about to start a graduate program in writing, but that little online space stuck. After about a year, it got an upgrade with its own dot com and email address, and from there, my little site and I went on to publish hundreds of posts, make a bunch of friends, sell enough ads for me to get a couple tiny checks, and even win a couple of very minor awards.
Then, I got my dream job, and because my dream job was located inside a government agency, I shut the site down. I was getting paid to write full-time now, and the site had played host to a various collection of mild political opinions over the years, and I didn’t want anyone from my new audience to think what I was doing wasn’t for them, because it’s for everyone, which is one of the reasons it’s my dream job. Anyway, the site hasn’t existed since 2011, and someone else has come along and bought the URL.
And anyway, by that time, social media had become a replacement for personal blogging, and many of the friendships from my blogging days had now become Facebook- and Twitter-based. The whole project just seemed a little old and bloated. After all, social media was so much more streamlined. Look here: You can just click this link in your sign-up confirmation email, and bam! Unlimited space for half-assed hot takes! Along with photos of the babies your high school friends have been having! Oh look! And their half-assed hot takes! Who knew the head cheerleader was ready to level racial slurs and lawsuit threats at people who don’t share her belief that the world is flat? Who knew the mild-mannered dude who led my college Bible study was a full-on white supremacist? Who knew my friend’s grandma liked the Dave Matthews Band?
I deleted my Facebook account in 2020. I couldn’t watch another presidential election unfold in that environment, and the pandemic made everything so much worse. I had come, over the years, to loathe Facebook in particular among social media sites, because it was the only online space where I regularly was confronted with comments sections that read like the dinner table scene from August: Osage County. In the Trump era, it was de rigueur to witness friendships and families falling to absolute pieces over a Facebook post. I even had some shitty social media interactions with my own family and friends. It was deleterious to my mental health—which is the nice way of saying that by 2020, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d logged into Facebook and not felt like actually killing myself. (I now maintain an account for work, but the only posts I ever create are Instagrams that somehow find their way across the Metaverse to my Facebook feed.) Conversations get heated at Instagram and Twitter, but there’s something about the social media space where grandmas and aunties and drunk uncles all hang out that just seemed to make it so much more toxic and personal.
In the Musk era of Twitter, it’s become fashionable to bemoan the death of personal blogging, so it’s not like I’m breaking any new rhetorical ground here, but man, those were the damn days. And maybe these nostalgists have a point. Blogging had a cost of admission. It was low, but it was a cost. Have all the hot takes you want, but first, you have to do the work of setting up the site, working on your CSS, thinking of something to say, typing it out, and—if you really want to show off—editing what you’ve written before publishing it. Something we know in publishing is that people feel more connection to things they pay for in one way or another. Do you feel more excited to read an issue of a magazine you subscribe to—or one of the free ones in wire racks inside the Mexican restaurant up the street?
So here I am, once again, in an online space I’ve paid for with a little money and a lot of work. I’ve made this entire thing as simple as I can: Black and white theme, Times New Roman font. I may or may not post photos. This is, as the original blog was, a place for me to use and refine my voice in pursuit of better writing and a better online experience after so many years in the social media cesspool. If you’ve got your own online writing space, drop the link in the comments. Let’s dust this old girl off and see how she runs.