And the blogiversary

This weekend - I guess it's actually the 27th rather than the 26th, if the time stamps on the old posts are right - is the anniversary of my starting this blog.

Back in 2002. It's not the oldest blog out there (there is at least one I read that is older). But it's one of the ones, if I may indulge myself, that is a survivor.

I joined back when blogs where a thing, and more-specifically, knitting blogs were a thing.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922 The internet, 2002. Twitter didn't exist. Instagram didn't exist. Facebook didn't exist. Even MySpace didn't exist yet. Smartphones were still five years in the future.

But Blogger existed. As did Wordpress and Typepad and a few other software packages and/or hosting sites (LiveJournal had been a thing for a while, and Geocities personal pages went back to my early days on the Web of the late 1990s)

I don't remember how I found the first knitting blogs. Perhaps through something written up in a magazine, perhaps through some other knitting website. But I thought: Since I don't have anything knit-related in my vicinity (In those days, there wasn't a knitting shop within several hours of me, there wasn't even a quilting shop closer than McKinney), maybe it would be nice to start a blog, so other people can read about what I do.

In those days comments weren't even an option; you had to either link up with an external system or code them yourself in the Blogger interface, and because I didn't know how and felt I didn't have time to learn, I went without comments until 2004 or so. (And went without photos for a while, mainly because I didn't have a digital camera).

During the heyday of knitting blogs I linked to - and was linked by - a lot of other knitters. It was cool and nice and fun. I knew other academicians who knit. I met up with one or two people who "knew" me from the blog.

People started getting book deals. And slowly, like everything, it began to change. Some of the people who got book deals posted less, or spent time promoting their books or book tours. Some people opened shops and their blog pivoted to being shop-blogs. (Don't get me wrong; a well done shop-blog is fine, but one that only ever posts "we have a new shipment of X" or "buy my stuff" is not a blog I will read).

I think a lot of people migrated to Facebook when it became a thing. I don't have a page; I have an account because there are a few things I need to look at (some of the information my town puts out) that is ONLY on FB and they put behind a signin-wall. But from the complaints I've heard from friends about petty squabbles and political/social commentary that tends to take complex problems and suggest clear and simple (and wrong*) solutions, I think I'm glad I'm not on there.

(* HL Mencken was right. At least on this)

Then came Knitter's Review and later, Ravelry, and I think a lot of people who either used to blog or might have blogged about knitting use that site to catalog projects instead. And that's fine. Though I will say I miss the old longer-form blogs where people talked about what they were working on, but also talked about their lives, or what they were reading, or some weird bird they saw out in the garden, or whatever. The little slices of life.

Part of this is that I do tend to be alone a lot: I am far from family, most of my friends here are very busy with their own lives, and also, perhaps, I've never exactly projected the image of "hey just feel free to call me up randomly to talk about random stuff." I suspect people view me as kind of private and self-contained, and I admit sometimes that's kind of a painful thing to be - I do miss sort of the ordinary human contact, where, I don't know, people talk about weird birds they saw in their gardens over a cup of tea.

And over time, some of the remaining blogs changed. A lot of people who were in their early 20s when they started them, they wound up "settling down" in one way or another - job, spouse, children were factors in this. In a lot of cases they blogged less and less. I'm sure their lives got busy.

I know my blog has changed: I talk about what I'm working on far less and I don't link as many things as I once did. Part of it, with the links, I feel like if you're on Ravelry (or involved in the quilt world some how), you've probably already seen it, I tend not to find these things quickly. And perhaps my attitude has changed a little: when I started this out (I was still in my 30s then!) I thought "Maybe someone will read your writing and love it and will help you get some kind of a book deal!" or "I'll be Internet-famous!"


Of course, I never thought that being Internet Famous would be an undesirable thing; I think that now. I'd rather be Known To A Few Friends On The Internet because "fame" is fleeting and there are an awful lot of people looking to tear you down.

And for that other? I've decided I don't have a book in me. I'm not sure I could sustain a theme for long enough to write a coherent book. Yes, I feel kind of bad about that; I have colleagues who have written books and I look at them and think about how that's something that will actually outlast their time on earth and....there's nothing like that for me; a couple years after I'm gone I'll be forgotten, and I don't even have kids to carry on any kind of genetic legacy. That shouldn't matter to me, I know, but it does.

I know it also took me a while to find my "voice;" I think I "sound more like myself" in the writing on the blog now - in the sense of it being more like how I speak - than it did in the early days, when things were shorter and more telegraphic. 

And yet, here I am, seventeen years later. Even though I'm a lot busier now than I once was (the unending acceleration of what we are expected to do) and I don't get as many things made. (As I said: the focus of the blog has changed. Part of that is I know a certain percentage of my readers AREN'T knitters, but part of it is I just like have something to write more or less every day, and if I only posted when I finished something, there might be one post a month....)

Also, I write this partly for me. So I can go back and look at what I was doing a year ago, or three. I was never good at keeping a paper diary, but I think the added tiny dopamine hit of the occasional comment* helped keep me going on it. (Also typing is easier on my hands than writing is these days)

(*Heh. I remember back in the early days of blogging, someone declared a "Would it kill ya to comment?" week where they asked people who read to at least leave some kind of a comment. And yeah, I like nice comments. I don't like the random anonymous vague comment from someone I don't recognize who is leaving a link or similar, and I do still get a few of those; sometimes as many spam comments as real comments, which is why I moderate, so you never see the spam)

I've never been a *popular* blogger. (Then again, I've never been a popular ANYTHING). The upside of that, though, is not being on a lot of people's radar, I don't get the awful comments some people seem to get (or at least seemed to, in the earlier days of blogging).

So anyway. I guess I'll keep writing, I assume some of you will keep reading.